"Łódź is a city of contrasts, of four cultures, a promised land. The Polish Manchester. A city of women. A city of Lodzermensch types. A city of transformation and its consequences... It carries a whole range of associations and emotions." (Katarzyna Kończal, curator of the exhibition School of Seeing: The City, Herbst Palace Museum, Łódź, 18 June - 31 December 2026)
The artistic and cinematic history of the Polish city of Łódź - with it famed film school, and strong links to the avant garde in painting - continues to intersect with its post-industrial present in vibrant ways, including in the many cultural events that take place in the city's revitalised spaces. After almost a decade of living in the city, I still find myself surprised by it, discovering new facets to a prismatic and often still underrated place.
One such event is Fotofestiwal, which celebrated its quarter century this June with a spectacularly packed programme across 10 days. While its primary focus remains photography, the festival also ranges across arts and culture in their widest expressions - film, music, sculpture, performance - dissolving boundaries to create an event that's as inclusive and interdisciplinary as it is international.
 |
Vive la résistance, Marta Bogdańska |
When it was founded in 2001, by students from several different academic disciplines, a decade after the post-communist closure of the city's textile factories had left Łódź at an economic low point, Fotofestiwal was very much an underground endeavour, with films shown from VHS tape and displays created from magazine cut-outs.
 |
| Vitamin, Augustin Rebetez |
Though much changed, expanded and polished since then, the festival still retains something of that raw, punkish energy today. For all the engagement with contemporary political and social ills in the art displayed, a defiant playfulness is also evident - both in the exhibits chosen by director/co-founder Krzysztof Candrowicz and his team of programmers/curators, and also in the city-wide locations in which the work is placed.
 |
| Better 'Magua' Than Pain, Helena Majewska |
Take, for instance, Vitamin, by Augustin Rebetez, a deliriously anarchic combo of kitsch, cats and politics presented in the loft of the Biedermann Palace, or Helena Majewska's Better 'Magua' Than Pain, a funky but also meditative reflection on Berlin and Warsaw club culture that took over the Machine Room of Fuzja, a historic former power plant, now a mixed-use site of cultural events, restaurants, and residences.
 |
| Eclipse, Adrian Chmielewski |
Majewska's immersive exhibition was nicely complemented across the city in the swish surroundings of PKO Bank Polski's Galeria Koncept by the display Przesilenie / Eclipse. Presided over by charismatic music manager, events organiser and concierge Eryk Czyżewski, this display of Adrian Chmielewski's exciting series of photographs taken at music festivals captured moments of artists' performances and revellers' communion with cinematic verve and even some fiery Sirât (2025)-style vibes.
Meanwhile, the former YMCA swimming pool on Moniuszki Street was startlingly repurposed as a cinema for Kino UTOPIA, an uncanny evocation of past picture palaces as centres of imagination and ideas. Here short films by Taiwanese talents Ying-Ju Chen, Kuang-Yu Tsui, Jui-Chung Yao, and Zi-Fu Chen, were screened in the pool, in a concept designed by Paweł Giza, with retro film posters adorning the walls of the upper level.
 |
| Kino UTOPIA |
More orthodox but still highly rewarding was the School of Seeing: The City display at the Herbst Palace Museum, an expansive reflection on 19th and 20th century urban experience and flânerie that transported the viewer from the Polish Manchester of the exhibition's location to Paris, London and other metropolises through carefully curated images and quotes.
 |
| American Cycles, Philip Montgomery |
In contrast, American Cycles, the exhibition of Philip Montgomery's photography at the City Art Gallery in Sienkiewicz Park, brought audiences right up to date with its focus on recent and ongoing US traumas, from the opioid crisis to instances of police brutality. The first time that the work of Montgomery, a regular contributor to publications including New York Times, has been presented in Poland, the black-and-white images also brought intimacy to celebrated subjects, from amusingly startled Supreme Court Justices to Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, gently head to head.
 |
| American Cycles, Philip Montgomery |
A street over, at Re:Medium Gallery on Piotrkowska, Izabela Łapińska's American Beauty collated the Polish photographer and filmmaker's portraits of individuals whom Łapińska had encountered on New York streets, with special attention to the subjects' lips in a lovely, affirmative display of US diversity.
 |
| Pig, Feng Li |
Alongside the aforementioned Biedermann Palace, the festival's other central hub was at Art_Inkubator, the former complex of textile warehouses close to Fuzja, where the main programme was presented. Here the festival's central theme of relations between human and animals was most prominently in evidence.
Startling highlights included Pig, Feng Li's subversive take on domestication: a photographic document of family life with an ever-growing porker and other adopted animals in a Chengdu apartment that suggested a Chinese counterpart to Malcom Mowbray's A Private Function (1984). Nikita Teryoshin's Backyard Diaries, meanwhile, was a moving, gritty display of photos of street cats from across the world: a sometimes painful but also vital antidote to Instagramable cuteness.
 |
| I'll Bet the Devil My Head, Carlos Alba |
Also asking tough questions about human/animal relations in an urban context was Carlos Alba's I'll Bet the Devil My Head, in which photos of urban foxes prowling the London borough of Tower Hamlets were juxtaposed with images of city brokers to evoke the capital's wealth disparities.
 |
Flipping the Bird, Jaap Scheeren/Rik van den Bos |
Jaap Scheeren and Rik van den Bos contributed Flipping the Bird, a brilliant 15 minute short film, or "photo novel," based around a walk across the Dutch dunes, in which pastoral rapture gives way to a more complicated rebuttal from nature's perspective. By turns irreverent, laugh-out-loud funny, and profound, this was among my favourite exhibits of the festival.
 |
| Luke Stephenson, An Incomplete History of Show Birds |
A sometime collaborator of Scheeren's, Luke Stephenson brought the delightful An Incomplete History of Show Birds, an example of the talented photographer's heartening attention to the more eccentric, arcane and undersung elements of British culture. The pictures looked at once sweetly enticing and quite imposing in their outdoor display at Schiller's Passage on Piotrkowska Street, where the city's own birds could be counted among the exhibit's charmed spectators.
The festival's biggest coup was surely its opening event, again held at Fuzja, and this time based around an unexpected collaboration. John Akomfrah's Listening All Night to the Rain was the celebrated artist-filmmaker's commissioned contribution to the 2024 Venice Biennale's British Pavilion. A further development of Akomfrah's series of collectively devised multi-screen film installations, Listening All Night to the Rain has been seen in various iterations since its Venice premiere: at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, and, currently, at Liverpool's Walker Art Gallery.
The Fotofestiwal presentation of the piece was entirely unique, however, in boasting new music composed to the images by Hania Rani (a recent winner at the European Film Awards for her soundtrack to Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value [2025]), and performed live by Rani on piano and cymbals at Fuzja.
 |
| Listening All Night to the Rain |
This surprising audiovisual synthesis proved highly effective and quite emotional. Since his breakthrough film, the amazing Handsworth Songs (1986), Akomfrah's tender and radical works, combining freshly filmed images with others drawn from archives, have always boasted extremely intricate soundscapes of their own, and may not seem to require further sonic intervention. Here, though, some of the original sounds could be heard faintly beneath Rani's live playing, creating another layer, a kind of audio palimpsest, that added to the richness and surprise of the images.
 |
| Listening All Night to the Rain |
Although the presentation of the piece as a 30 minute work on 6 screens meant that its original scope (which included around 30 hours of footage across 60 screens in 8 rooms in Venice) was considerably reduced, Akomfrah's fluid, associative, haptic imagery - of drowned clocks and dancing bodies, ticking metronomes and James Baldwin on the telephone, political protests and pre-Raphaelite paintings - still offered plenty of riches to absorb, with Rani's playing a by turns rapturous, delicate and discordant addition.
 |
| Listening All Night to the Rain |
Akomfrah's "bricolage" filmmaking has always been drawn to finding connections between apparently disparate aspects of the world. And with the screens fading in and out on the faces of different human subjects, suggesting a relay of experiences both deeply personal and collective, this iteration of Listening All Night to the Rain wonderfully evoked the idea of each individual as a living archive of memory and incident. For all the histories of oppression and crises they gesture towards, Akomfrah's recent works have a deeply cleansing, spiritual impact, and the new music accentuated that effect. "We might do it again," said Rani, of the performance. Let's hope so.
 |
| American Beauty, Izabela Łapińska |
Akomfrah - whose first visit to Łódź this was but who, in his brief introduction to the performance, called the city a "mecca" for students of his generation - has described an important aspect of his work as "creating spaces of freedom" for audiences. In its remarkable range and its democratic showcasing of work by global artists - both those long established and those newly emerging - this year's anniversary edition of Fotofestiwal offered many such liberating, challenging and inspiring spaces for its attendees. The above remarks cover only a fraction of the festival's abundance of riches - its at times overwhelming array of events and exhibits. This unique and exhilarating festival continues to grow and evolve, and showcases Łódź at its best and most inclusive. Here's to the next 25 years.
Fotofestiwal took place in Łódź between 18-28 June 2026. However, some of the exhibits, including several mentioned above, continue to be displayed throughout the year. Further details here.
