On August 6, 2026, at 6:00 p.m., Grzegorz Jarmocewicz’s exhibition “Retrospective 1995–2026” will open at the Photography Museum. The exhibition will run until September 6, 2026.

Spanning more than three decades, this retrospective traces a life built almost entirely around photography. As an artist, educator, and Founder and Artistic Director of the Białystok INTERPHOTO Festival, his dedication to the medium extends beyond his own frame, his work has consistently built spaces, platforms, and opportunities for others. At the center of his own practice, though, sits one persistent question: how time, memory, and power shape human reality, and who gets to decide what any of it is allowed to mean.

He began in the mid-1990s, with Props Room (1994–1995), staged photographs made amid the turbulent social and economic transitions of post-communist Poland. Drawing on Dadaism, post-modernist irony, and the theatre of the absurd, he built surreal, gravity-defying scenes and reversed familiar religious and mythological iconography, not for comic effect alone, but as a way of pushing back against the new commercial dogmas and cultural stereotypes taking hold at the time. Critic Marek Grygiel saw in this early work an artist already testing how deeply such stereotypes are lodged in an image before we notice them there.

That irony soon deepened into something closer to restitution. Born in Suwałki, a borderland shaped by historical trauma and political divides, Jarmocewicz turned his attention to the physical and historical wounds of his own region. In Traces II (1996), confronted by the desecrated, exposed remains of the Fahrenheit family tomb, his practice shifted from staging to testimony. Dr. Krzysztof Jurecki described the sensibility that followed as suspended between modernist and post-modernist tradition, held, in his words, “between heaven and hell.”

Through long exposures made with a 4×5 pinhole camera, and later through patient archival research, Jarmocewicz kept returning to what a place remembers once the people who lived it are gone. In Every Overpast Moment, he placed century-old portraits of children of different faiths, Jewish, Muslim, Old Believer, Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran and Calvinist, beside photographs of children living in those same borderland homes today. It is work made in a region where borders have, within living memory, divided neighbours and set them against one another in the name of nations that redrew themselves more than once in a single century, a history this project quietly refuses to let go unremarked.

That same attention to what a society would rather forget or control carried into the present tense by the early 2020s. In Camera Opresiva (2022–2023), Jarmocewicz built a multi-part investigation into the modern apparatus of control, biometric profiling, AI algorithms, deepfakes, and state surveillance. The work stopped simply observing and began measuring: registering the political pressure building around it, and how power structures manipulate collective belief to enforce division. The system responded. Under the right-wing nationalist government, Polish state authorities censored and shut down Jarmocewicz’s exhibition, and INTERPHOTO, the festival Jarmocewicz had spent over a decade building in Białystok, lost its funding in 2023, waiting for a change in government before it could continue.

His visual language is easily readable, but its depth lies in what it is measuring. Read across three decades, Jarmocewicz’s work functions like a social barometer, held up in turn to memory, to history, and to the mechanisms of contemporary control: showing what a given moment was doing to the people living through it, and what kind of reaction that moment was likely to trigger.

About the author

Grzegorz Jarmocewicz – polish visual artist, photographer, educator, curator, juror for international photography competitions, and portfolio reviewer. Co-founder and Artistic Director of the International Photography Festival Białystok INTERPHOTO, one of the most prestigious photography festivals in Central and Eastern Europe. Author of writings on photography and member of the Editorial Board of European Photography Magazine and Digital Humanities and Society Studies.

He graduated with honours in photography from the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań, earned his PhD at the Łódź National Film School, and completed his habilitation at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk. He is currently a professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn.

Jarmocewicz’s work has been exhibited on photography platforms worldwide. His pieces are held in private collections as well as in the Regional Museum in Suwałki, the Centre for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, the Museo Ken Damy di Fotografia Contemporanea in Brescia, Italy, the Arsenał Municipal Gallery in Poznań, the Centre for Contemporary Art in Suwałki, and the CLZ in Białystok.

Exhibition curator – Valentyn Odnoviun

Exhibition communication designer – Darius Linkevičius

Organiser – The branch of the Šiauliai Aušra Museum – the Photography Museum

Partners:

Białystok Interphoto
University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn
University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn Faculty of Arts
University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn Institute of Visual Arts
Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art