The commemoration of the liquidation of Liztmannstadt-Getto is annually accompanied by activities around the visual arts. This year, together with the Municipal Art Gallery, we invite you to an exhibition, which is the first in the world to present the found works of Zeni Larsson - a Jewish woman born in Lodz in 1922 as Szajna Marcinkowska. The opening of the exhibition will take place on Sunday, August 25 at 4:00 pm at the Balucka Gallery in the Old Market Square. It will be accompanied by a performance by artist Izabela Maciejewska, inspired by the life and work of the exhibition's heroine. The opening will be preceded by the unveiling of a mural at 25 Lagiewnicka Street dedicated to Zeni Larsson.
In the ghetto she began creating her first clay sculptures, which were a prelude to her future career as an artist. After the war, thanks to incredible determination, Larsson continued her art education at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm. Since the 1960s, she devoted herself primarily to literary work. Although she was one of the best-known representatives of Holocaust literature in Sweden, since her death in 2007, the memory of Zeni as an artist and writer has quickly faded. The exhibition is being created through the thorough research and investigation of curator Ursula Ulla Chowaniec. Significantly, Zeni Larsson's biography is closely linked to the life story of Chava Rosenfarb - a Lodz-born, Yiddish-writing poet and writer, last year's patron of Lodz, who settled in Canada after the war. Chava was Zeni's faithful life companion - first from her childhood backyards in Lodz, then in the ghetto and concentration camps, then a friend with whom she corresponded almost all her life. In this way, the two women, born and raised in Lodz, connected Stockholm and Montreal by irregular, though more than 60-year-long letter dialogues in the only language they had in common - Polish. The Swedish artist and writer recounted her life in Polish to a Yiddish-writing writer from Canada. The exhibition will be accompanied by the Polish premiere of Zeni Larsson's novel “Shadows at the Wooden Bridge” (translated from Swedish by Piotr Zettinger and Katarzyna Tubylewicz), published by the Dialogue Center Library. Published in Sweden in 1960, it is part of a trilogy describing the fate of a young girl Paula. The next parts of the trilogy are “Lang rgryningen” (The Long Dawn, 1961) and “Livet till mtes (Life Toward Meeting, 1962). The trilogy, which is largely autofiction, explores various stages of Paula's life: from the dramatic events in the ghetto, to her last months in Bergen-Belsen, to her new life in Sweden. The opening of the exhibition of Zeni Larsson's works has been scheduled for Sunday, August 25 at 4:00 pm at the Balucka Gallery in the Old Market. It will be accompanied by a performance by artist Izabela Maciejewska, inspired by the life and work of the exhibition's heroine.
The opening will be preceded by the unveiling of a mural at 25 Lagiewnicka Street dedicated to Zeni Larsson.
Program of activities around the exhibition dedicated to the works of Zenia Marcinkowska-Larsson
August 25 / Sunday
15.00 - Unveiling of a mural in the space of Lodz dedicated to writer and sculptor Zeni Marcinkowska-Larsson. PL
Place: 25 Lagiewnicka St.
Organizer: Marek Edelman Center for Dialogue in Lodz.
16.00 - Zenia Marcinkowska-Larsson. Sculptures. Memory. Words.
The opening of an exhibition of sculptures by Zenia Marcinkowska-Larsson.
Curator: Urszula Ulla Chowaniec. The exhibition is accompanied by a performance inspired by the life and work of Zeni Marcinkowska-Larsson. Artistic collaboration and performance: Izabela Maciejewska. vernissage combined with the promotion of the first Polish edition of the book Shadows at the Wooden Bridge (translated from Swedish by Piotr Zettinger and Katarzyna Tubylewicz). EN/ENG
Place: Bałucka Gallery, Stary Rynek 2.
Organizer: Municipal Art Gallery in Lodz and Marek Edelman Center for Dialogue in Lodz.
Urszula (Ulla) Chowaniec: literary scholar specializing in women's history. She lives in Stockholm, is a lecturer at Lund University, and also serves as a professor at Andrzej Frycz-Modrzewski Academy in Krakow. She is the author of books including: “In Search of a Woman: On the Early Novels of Irena Krzywicka” (2007), ‘Melancholic Migrating Bodies in Contemporary Polish Women's Writing’ (2015). She creates podcasts and organizes academic and artistic events. She is the curator of the exhibition “One Hundred Years, so What?” - dedicated to the centenary of women's emancipation in Poland (Birmingham, 2018), content consultant for the exhibition on Irony (Torun 2024), co-organizer of festivals, including “Queer the Other Europe UCL” (London).
Izabela Maciejewska: visual artist. Sculptor, photographer, performer, painter. Creates installations and video art. Graduate of art schools in Lodz: Wł.Strzemiński Academy of Fine Arts in Lodz and L. Schiller National Higher School of Film, Television and Theater PWSFTviT in Lodz.
18.00 - Women writers from the Lodz ghetto - walk. Leading: Joanna Podolska, director of the Marek Edelman Center for Dialogue in Lodz. ENG
Start: Balucka Gallery, Stary Rynek 2.
Organizer: Marek Edelman Center for Dialogue in Lodz.
Description: Representatives of all social strata ended up in the Lodz ghetto: doctors and teachers, shoemakers and tailors, merchants and small factory owners, waiters and thieves, painters, musicians, journalists and writers. Among them were no shortage of women who practiced various professions, including artists and writers, such as Miriam Ulinower and Melania Fogelbaum. The times of the ghetto and the camps contributed to the fact that after the war some female prisoners decided to describe their experiences, and wrote in different countries and in different languages: Chava Rosenfarb in Yiddish in Canada, Zenia Larson - in Swedish in Stockholm, Sara Zyskind in Hebrew in Israel. During a short walk we will walk in their footsteps.
Admission is free!