/ 4 days / 4 photographers / 4 themes /

The exhibition 4#4#Białystok at the nEUROPA gallery brings together photographic works by three photographers from Germany (Jürgen Matschie / Jan Oelker / Matthias Schumann) and the Polish photographer Piotr Niedźwiedź, who lives in Białystok.

The starting point and common reference space is the eastern Polish city of Białystok - a place that symbolises the historical rifts, cultural overlaps and current social tensions in Europe like no other. The three Saxon photographers visited the city in autumn 2024 as part of a photo festival.

Białystok is located close to today's Polish-Belarusian border and has been a political, religious and cultural crossroads for centuries. The city belonged to various dominions - the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Russian Tsarist Empire and was also briefly under German occupation - and was characterised by the close coexistence of different ethnic and religious groups. Before the Second World War, the Jewish population made up a significant part of the city's society; Białystok was considered an important centre of Jewish culture, language and industry. The Shoah meant an almost complete break with this tradition, traces of which are now only fragmentary in the cityscape.

The exhibited photographs approach Białystok from the subjective perspectives of the photographers and take up various aspects of urban life. They reveal relics of Jewish history as well as contemporary expressions of urban culture, for example in the local graffiti and street art scene. Typical urban spaces - housing estates, squares, peripheral zones - are shown as places of everyday life, but also as projection surfaces for social and political negotiation processes.

Another focus is on current areas of social conflict. The German photographers happened to witness a large LGBT demonstration, which points to Białystok's special role in the current Polish discourse, in which issues of identity, minority rights and national self-definition are highly contested. The city is repeatedly seen as a symbol of conservative and nationalist tendencies, but is also the scene of counter-movements, civic engagement and cultural resistance.

The interplay of the four photographic positions does not create a closed portrait of the city, but rather a multi-layered mosaic. The German photographers' external perspectives meet a Polish perspective that is more strongly characterised by proximity, everyday experience and historical roots. It is precisely this juxtaposition that opens up productive areas of tension between observation and participation, distance and identification.

4#4#Białystok is thus not only an exhibition about a specific city, but also a reflection on urban spaces in border locations, on memory and visibility and on the political and cultural forces that characterise European cities today.

Participating photographers

Jürgen Matschie (DE)
Jan Oelker (DE)
Matthias Schumann (DE)
Piotr Niedźwiedź (PL)

Curation

Matthias Schumann

Cover

Piotr Niedźwiedź

The project is funded by the State Ministry of Social Affairs and Social Cohesion. This measure is co-financed with tax funds on the basis of the budget adopted by the Saxon state parliament as part of the funding programme "Wir für Sachsen".