The Asymetria Gallery, founded in 2008 in an apartment in a historical tenement in the heart of Warsaw, is the first gallery on the Polish market with an exhibition program devoted to Polish artistic and historical photography. The exhibitions focus on photographic phenomena from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, with highlights from other periods from before 1939.

This orientation towards the past is based on extensive research activity conducted in close cooperation with the Archeology of Photography Foundation, an autonomous NGO with a multifaceted program embracing research and promotion of key photographic collections in private possession.

The name of the gallery is a reference to the famous series and a text by Zbigniew Dlubak in which the artist conveyed his belief that “the world consists of various and unique, that is asymmetrical, phenomena". Asymmetry in this case, lies in the inability to construct an unambiguous, meaning symmetrical, vision of reality, which is illustrated by the gallery’s subsequent shows.

The gallery has been born out of the need for rediscovering the artistically relevant material which left its mark on the history of Polish photography. “Repetition” serves as an important though misleading notion in this context, referring not as much to the reconstruction of existing material as to its rediscovery in a contemporary context. The exhibition, and the participation in the Paris-Photo, is part of a broader endeavor aimed at popularizing the knowledge of Polish photography. Discovering the photographic heritage of Poland, just as that of other Central-European countries, leads to a shift in artistic geographies, shedding new light and leading to reassessments of popular art history, and history of photography in particular.

 Rafał Lewandowski