Exhibition: The waking Krakow

Hall, Congress Center of the Agriculture University

May, 2025

Photographs by Alicja Jagielska (student AGH, Krakow) are an attempt to capture amazing details of nature awakening near the main historical sites in Krakow. The works, titled collectively The Awakening Krakow, can be interpreted in different perspectives. One of them is nature coming back to life in the city, lightened by the rising sun. It is the awakening of the nature and the city. Another perspective refers to nature waking in Krakow, and the city itself made alive and bright by flowers and trees blooming after a tough, cloudy and gloomy winter. Beauty, a fairy-tale-like quality and an obvious un-obvious character of the nature in the city coming back to live after winter, captured in the colour photographs not only energise the spectators. They also provoke them to notice in every blossoming bud that what is unique, delightful and what stimulates a reflection over the elusiveness of the details. They also help realise that every beginning is meaningful despite the fact that it eventually comes to an end.

The photographs expose the different facets of light. Bright, dark, greys, shadows, illuminations emphasise the beauty of colors and the Krakow nature, captured with the camera. Spectators are inspired to look deeply into their own plans and resolutions at the onset of spring. The message of the Artist is: sometimes, all it takes is to stop and look at the vivid green, sprinkled with countless, colourful flowers, bushes and trees, bathed in the spring sunlight. Spring. The time of revival and pausing to realize, with the full strength, the abundance of nature and human existence, their beauty captured within fractions of a second to show power of this awakening, the will to live. Alicja Jagielska’s photographs of blooming flowers and trees around the most beautiful historical sites in Krakow allowed to keep this fragile beauty in unforgettable impressions painted with a camera.

After seeing this exhibition, walking through Wawel, Planty Park and the Old Town will be a completely different experience.  It will turn into an adventure made unique by extraordinary flowers covering ordinary squares and trees. It will become an invitation to give non-obvious meanings to life waking up, captured in the colourful, individual interpretation of things at sight, right next to us. The nature coming back to live, presented in the individual narrative, determines the content and character of the meaning assigned by people immersed in it, who also become awake.

                                                                 Review by

Assc. prof. Joanna M. Łukasik