As part of the UK/Poland Season 2025, Belfast Exposed is presenting three simultaneous exhibitions this Autumn, showcasing the work of four seminal Polish photographers. These exhibitions bring together four groundbreaking Polish artists, Zofia Rydet, Anna Beata Bohdziewicz, Teresa Gierzyńska, and Aneta Grzeszykowska to explore how photography has been used across generations to question identity, memory, and the visibility of women’s lives. Though their practices differ in method and era, each artist turns the camera into a tool for self-definition, resistance, and storytelling, reclaiming image-making as a way of shaping how women are seen, and how they see themselves.
Rydet’s monumental Sociological Record transformed the interiors of ordinary homes into stages of social portraiture, creating an archive that is at once systematic and profoundly empathetic. Bohdziewicz, through her long-running Photo-Diary, inscribed history with her own hand, blending text and image to record the inseparability of the personal and political. Gierzyńska, in her About Her series, used her own body and domestic spaces to perform states of female being, hopeful, worried, dangerous, independent insisting that intimacy and self-scrutiny could carry political weight. Grzeszykowska, in works such as Album and Selfie, fragments, erases, or reconstructs her image, confronting the fragility of presence and the instability of selfhood in a media-saturated age. Placed together, these practices form a powerful intergenerational dialogue and underscores photography’s dual role as archive and experiment, empathy and critique.