The Millennium Shool cycle Reference Image

Forty-four photographs taken after 18 years to reminisce about the “millennium school” with a 45-year history. It is not the magic of numbers, but the magic of the photographic frame catching lost time, and simultaneously recording the traces of today’s reality. Krzysztof Zieliński’s series allows us to look into a school deserted for holidays. Sometimes we are offered a detail (dilapidated door on a yellow wall), sometimes a broad view (an illuminated row of desks in a classroom), or finally, in one picture, pupils (a blurred image of a girl looking at the lens, with her colleagues in the background). Everything is kept in intense colours that almost come out of the frame. The impression produced by these sometimes unreal, occasionally fairy-tale-like interiors is completed by the light and painting composition, and is reinforced by the ilfochrome technique which gives 3D depth and light.
Although focused on a specific place – the primary school in Wąbrzeźno – Zieliński’s photographs present a wider history, which can be examined on several planes. [A. Dzierżyc-Horniak]

Forty-four photographs taken after 18 years to reminisce about the “millennium school” with a 45-year history. It is not the magic of numbers, but the magic of the photographic frame catching lost time, and simultaneously recording the traces of today’s reality. Krzysztof Zieliński’s series allows us to look into a school deserted for holidays. Sometimes we are offered a detail (dilapidated door on a yellow wall), sometimes a broad view (an illuminated row of desks in a classroom), or finally, in one picture, pupils (a blurred image of a girl looking at the lens, with her colleagues in the background). Everything is kept in intense colours that almost come out of the frame. The impression produced by these sometimes unreal, occasionally fairy-tale-like interiors is completed by the light and painting composition, and is reinforced by the ilfochrome technique which gives 3D depth and light.
Although focused on a specific place – the primary school in Wąbrzeźno – Zieliński’s photographs present a wider history, which can be examined on several planes.
Plane one: a mental journey into childhood. The photographer confronts the memories of the school he used to know (then: a source of pride and a model to be followed) with what he sees years later (today: an awkwardly masked mediocrity), and is “shocked” into creating a story full of melancholy and nostalgia for a lost and care-free time. Plane two: historical and current problems. Although the artist escaped from these references in his commentary, they nevertheless kept returning, reinforced by the title of the work (this is one of the famous “millennium schools” from Gomułka’s times, given to the nation by the Party), by the time of studying (the years 1981–1989, significant for Poland), and by the consecutive frames (the photographs of Broniewski, who was praised by the People’s Republic of Poland, are juxtaposed against the eagle and the cross in other classrooms). Plane three: the role of documentary photography in contemporary art. For the artist, the “objective” eye of the camera becomes a tool, deployed more or less consciously, to intertwine the past with the present, creating an embellished reality.
In effect, Zieliński’s photographs, all of which are in the CoCA The Signs of Time collection, effectively intercept the viewer’s imagination and attention. But this is not the first time that he has done that: Millenium School is a continuation of sorts of Hometown, the project that made him famous when, after years spent in Prague and Berlin, photography allowed him to retrieve and re-discover his own little homeland in Wąbrzeźno. [A. Dzierżyc-Horniak]