Krzysztof Kieślowski and Marcela Paniak belong to two different generations. They could never meet as artists, but they can meet through images. It is from such an impossible encounter that “Lightmemory” emerged – an exhibition opened in the Multimedia Hall of the former Dr Brehmer Sanatorium in Sokołowsko during the 15th edition of the Hommage à Kieślowski Film Festival.
Marcela Paniak is a photographer as well as an archivist at the Krzysztof Kieślowski Archive. In her everyday work, she engages with the material traces of his presence: documents, screenplays, notes, photographs and objects. In “Lightmemory”, however, she is also interested in another kind of archive – a private one, impossible to catalogue, composed of memory, emotions, intuition and associations.
The meeting point of these two orders becomes the artist’s own image. Paniak explores the female perspective in Kieślowski’s cinema, returning in particular to “The Double Life of Véronique”, the “Three Colours” trilogy and “Seven Women of Different Ages”. Yet she does not impersonate the heroines of his films, nor does she reconstruct individual film frames. Instead, she filters these images through her own face, body and contemporary experience, asking what remains alive in them today – and who we might become when we look at ourselves through someone else’s images.
The title, “Lightmemory”, works somewhat like photography itself: the past is exposed to light once again. Not in order to recreate it faithfully, but to discover what new meanings it may reveal after many years.
“Lightmemory” is therefore a personal dialogue with Kieślowski’s work, but also a story about memory, time and the image, as well as about the archive itself as a living substance that can not only be preserved and described, but also reread and reinterpreted.
An archive can preserve an image. But it is only through another act of looking that the image begins to live again.
Artist: Marcela Paniak
Academic supervision: Krzysztof Teodorowicz
Organisational supervision: Bożenna Biskupska, Zuzanna Fogtt
Partner: Viva Archiva! Foundation
Multimedia Hall – Dr Brehmer Sanatorium, Sokołowsko
Opening: 28 August 2026, 1:00 PM
Exhibition dates: 29-30 August 2026, 10:00 AM-8:00 PM
Exhibition coverage:
https://www.facebook.com/
Photography: Kazimierz Ździebło, Karolina Chmiel
The exhibition was organised as part of the 15th edition of the Hommage à Kieślowski Film Festival.
https://hommageakieslowski.pl/