2026 DAEJEON PHOTO FESTIWAL

In September, the Daejeon Photo Festival will take place in South Korea, to which we have been invited to participate, and where we will present projects by two artists – Michał Adamski and Łukasz Rusznica.

This year’s festival aims to provide a report on work in the Anthropocene – revealing how people navigated, resisted, and maintained their dignity within the global flows of capital. As festival director Jeauk Kang writes, civilization is a structure built on consumption, and what this exhibition captures in its gaze is precisely its remnant. Work has not disappeared. It has simply vanished from the view of the capital that exploits it and has been erased from the consumer’s eye. Photography is the oldest technology of resistance to this erasure – and today, a technology that also participates in it.

The projects we are presenting, “When Water Covers the Earth” by Michał Adamski and “All Empires Will Fall” by Łukasz Rusznica, do not speak about work in its most obvious sense. They do not show factories, machines, or people performing their duties. They approach work as a relationship between humans, landscape, time, and the inevitability of transience. Both projects question the limits of human agency, seeking answers in different directions. They challenge the belief that the value of human action is measured primarily by the ability to constantly transform reality. They propose a perspective in which humans cease to be the sole point of reference. In this sense, the exhibition is not about the end of work, but about the end of the notion that work is the ultimate source of human agency and the measure of our place in the world. It thus opens a space for considering human presence as one of many forces co-creating the world.

In addition to presenting both projects, their curator, Paweł Bąkowski, will participate in a panel discussion, where he will discuss the context of work in Polish photography, using artists such as Zofia Rydet, Tadeusz Rolke, and Wojciech Wilczyk as examples.

2026 Daejeon International Photo Festival
09.09 – 20.09.2026