Demokracja zapomnianego imienia

Marta Kufel writes of the Impossibility of Presence exhibition at Krakow's Walery Rzewuski Museum of the History of Photography (29.10.-31.12.2015). Apart from the three photographs which are key to the Theater of Death, it brings together photographs from the plays of Tadeusz Kantor, as well as photographs from museum's collections, which demonstrate iconographic similarities to the artist's family photographs. The author analyzes the ties between the Theater of Death and the photographs, and explores their mutual status. The most interesting part of the exhibition, to her mind, is outside the museum building - the museum's photographs scattered around Krakow. The author examines the ontological status of photography in the city space, saying that the exhibition's creators have achieved "a dramatization of the city as a space of death".