{"id":18479,"date":"2026-04-16T10:42:06","date_gmt":"2026-04-16T10:42:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/new.mnk.pl\/wystawy\/zygmunt-rytka-to-whom-does-the-cosmos-belong\/"},"modified":"2026-04-16T10:43:50","modified_gmt":"2026-04-16T10:43:50","slug":"zygmunt-rytka-to-whom-does-the-cosmos-belong","status":"publish","type":"wystawy","link":"https:\/\/mnk.pl\/en\/wystawy\/zygmunt-rytka-to-whom-does-the-cosmos-belong\/","title":{"rendered":"Zygmunt Rytka. To Whom Does the Cosmos Belong?"},"content":{"rendered":"

To Whom Does the Cosmos Belong?\u00a0is the first exhibition of the works of Zygmunt Rytka to have been realised by utilising the late artist\u2019s digitised archive. The structural starting point for the exhibition is the\u00a0Photovision\u00a0series, the main part of which was created between 1978\u20131983. This was a period spanning the end of the Gierek era, with its attempts at creating a socialist consumer society; subsequent strikes and the struggle for the legalisation of the Solidarity labour movement; and the declaration and imposition of martial law in Poland, accompanied by increasing propaganda and manipulation of mass media through information channels controlled by the regime. During this time, Rytka embarked on a project oriented around photographing his television screen. He took more than 5,000 pictures from this vantage, the majority of which have never been published. These photographs capture not only the political and cultural climate of Poland in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but they also transcend literality, forming a stream of unsettling images, as if unspooling from the collective consciousness of modern society.<\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

Other works on display also relate to the interplay between government and society within the context of media, propaganda, and manipulation. Among them is a little-known series of photographs titled\u00a01981, depicting individuals reading newspapers carrying bulletins from Communist Party meetings. We do not see the readers\u2019 faces\u2014instead only their hands, cigarettes, silhouettes, coats, and hats. It is these human contours that form a frame for the propagandistic content carried by the newspapers. The exhibition also includes a fragment of Rytka\u2019s film and video work.\u00a0Fiat 126p, from 1976, is a satirical film in which the artist portrays the \u2018Toddler,\u2019 as the iconic car was nicknamed in Poland, as a fetishistic object of sexual desire.\u00a0Retransmission, a filmic collage assembled in video format in 1988, is a record of the period\u2019s zeitgeist, and of the rhetoric and iconography of government-controlled mass media during the Polish People\u2019s Republic, with the artist\u2019s commentary.<\/p>

Organizer: Photomonth<\/strong>

Exhibition partner: National Museum in Krakow<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Czarny<\/figure>\n
\"Czarno-bia\u0142y<\/figure>\n
\"Czarno-bia\u0142e<\/figure>\n
\"Ekran<\/figure>\n
\"Czarno-bia\u0142e<\/figure>\n
\"Czarno-bia\u0142y<\/figure>\n
\"Czarno-bia\u0142e<\/figure>\n
\"Czarnobia\u0142y<\/figure>\n
\"Czarno-bia\u0142e,<\/figure>\n
\"Czarno-bia\u0142y,<\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To Whom Does the Cosmos Belong?\u00a0is the first exhibition of the works of Zygmunt Rytka to have been realised by utilising the late artist\u2019s digitised archive. The structural starting point for the exhibition is the\u00a0Photovision\u00a0series, the main part of which was created between 1978\u20131983. This was a period spanning the end of the Gierek era, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":18492,"template":"","wystawy_categories":[],"class_list":["post-18479","wystawy","type-wystawy","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mnk.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/wystawy\/18479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mnk.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/wystawy"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mnk.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/wystawy"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mnk.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mnk.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/wystawy\/18479\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mnk.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mnk.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"wystawy_categories","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mnk.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/wystawy_categories?post=18479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}