Startle. Paulina Ołowska & Deborah Turbeville
Par „»Popłochy« to nagłe poruszenie, niepokój, trudne do uchwycenia napięcie – stan doskonale oddający nastrój fotografii Turbeville, których bohaterki zdają się zawieszone między obecnością a nieobecnością”. Drugie znaczenie nawiązuje do popłochu pospolitego, czyli rośliny potocznie nazywanej ostem. Rośnie ona często wśród ruin, na nieużytkach, obrzeżach. Na wystawie oset jest figurą pamięci, ochrony, odporności – sztuki tworzonej przez kobiety, która potrafi przetrwać w trudnych warunkach, na obrzeżach głównego nurtu.
À propos de l’exposition
Opening: 11 December 2026, 6 p.m.
Women resembling apparitions, balancing on the border between waking and dreaming, abandoned interiors and scattered light: the world of Deborah Turbeville, a legend of fashion photography, captivates with its mystery. At the exhibition “Popłochy” at the Muzeum Fotografii w Krakowie, Paulina Ołowska, an acclaimed painter and maker of collages, photographs and installations, enters into dialogue with Turbeville's 1998 Kraków session. It is a meeting of two artists who find in archives and traces of the past inspiration for new meanings and stories.
The starting point of the exhibition is a photo session Deborah Turbeville shot in 1998 for the American fashion magazine “W”. Its setting was Kraków, a city that 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” session went far beyond the aesthetics of luxury fashion magazines of the 1990s. Instead of a colourful, idealised world, Turbeville created images that are mysterious, unsettling and steeped in the spirit of 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 shaped by costumes and set 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 curator Weronika Ptak explains: “‘Popłochy’ is a sudden stirring, unease, a hard-to-grasp tension, a state that perfectly captures the mood of Turbeville's photographs, whose heroines seem suspended between presence and absence.” The second meaning refers to the common burdock, a plant colloquially called ‘ost’ in Polish. It often grows among ruins, on wasteland and at the edges. In the exhibition, the thistle is a figure of memory, protection and resilience: art created by women that can survive in difficult conditions and on the margins 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 in the collections of, among others, 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), drawing from oblivion their biographies, aesthetics and visual languages in order to give them new life. Her encounter with Turbeville's work is a dialogue between two kindred artistic attitudes. The Kraków project is a further chapter of a relationship begun with the exhibition “Resonance” at Kurimanzutto gallery in Mexico (2023), and continued with the project “Paulina Ołowska and Deborah Turbeville: Widows of the Wind” at 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 session to later interventions in the finished print. The artist scratched, tore and aged her photographs, giving them the character of objects recovered from another time. Ołowska treats creation in a similar way, 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 Turbeville prints 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 installation is completed by a sculptural installation…
