Commotion. Paulina Ołowska & Deborah Turbeville

Opening: 11 December 2026, 6:00 p.m.

Women who resemble apparitions, balancing on the border between waking and dreaming, abandoned interiors and scattered light: the world of Deborah Turbeville, a legend of world fashion photography, captivates with its mystery. The exhibition "Commotion" at the Museum of Photography in Kraków enters into dialogue with Turbeville's Kraków shoot from 1998, through the work of Paulina Ołowska, an acclaimed painter and author of collages, photographs and installations. This is a meeting of two artists who find in archives and traces of the past the inspiration to create new meanings and stories.

The starting point of the exhibition is a photo shoot that Deborah Turbeville produced in 1998 for the American fashion magazine "W". Its setting was Kraków, a city that had fascinated the artist during her first trip to Poland in the 1970s as a world entirely different from New York, where she lived and worked. The "Kraków" shoot went far beyond the aesthetics of luxury fashion magazines prevalent in the 1990s. Instead of a colourful, idealised world, Turbeville created images that are mysterious, unsettling and deeply imbued with the spirit of the place. The models posed on the streets of the Old Town, in the Pod Baranami Palace, in the Noworolski café in the Sukiennice, and in the abandoned Potocki Palace in Krzeszowice. The exceptional atmosphere was also shaped by costumes and stage elements borrowed from the archives of Tadeusz Kantor's Cricot 2 Theatre. Today Deborah Turbeville is regarded as one of the most original photographers of the second half of the 20th century. In an era of sharp, perfectly retouched images, she created her own recognisable visual language based on understatement, melancholy and traces of passing time.

The title of the exhibition can be read in two ways. As Weronika Ptak, the curator of the exhibition, explains: "'Commotion' is a sudden stirring, unease, a tension that is hard to grasp – a state that perfectly captures the mood of Turbeville's photographs, whose subjects seem suspended between presence and absence." The second meaning refers to the common burdock, a plant colloquially known as thistle. It often grows among ruins, on wasteland and at the margins. In the exhibition, the thistle is a figure of memory, protection and resilience – of art created by women, which can survive in difficult conditions and on the edges of the mainstream.

This way of thinking about painting, curatorial projects and installations has been developed for years by Paulina Ołowska, one of the most important Polish contemporary artists. Her works are held, among others, in the collections of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and Tate Modern in London. The artist returns to the history of women – artists, designers and creators – bringing their biographies, aesthetics and visual languages out of oblivion so as to give them new life. Her encounter with Turbeville's work is a dialogue between two related artistic attitudes. The Kraków project is a further chapter of a relationship begun with the exhibition "Resonance" at the Kurimanzutto gallery in Mexico (2023), and continued in the project "Paulina Ołowska and Deborah Turbeville: Widows of the Wind" at the Pace gallery in Geneva (2024/2025).

The way both artists work with archives and the creative process strongly connects them. For Turbeville, experimentation covered the entire course of work: from choosing her subjects and building the atmosphere of the shoot to later interventions in the finished print – she scratched the photographs, tore them and aged them, giving them the character of objects retrieved from another time. Ołowska likewise treats creation as an open process spanning various media – from the archives of other women creators she draws forms, figures and visual languages that can resonate anew.

The MuFo presents original prints by Turbeville from the MUUS Collection. Paulina Ołowska responds to them with paintings on glass. The transparent panes subtly interpenetrate with the architecture, creating a fleeting visual layer. The artist also introduces abstract wall painting into the interior. The arrangement is completed by a sculptural installation…