The series of photographs "Warsaw Portraits" was created during the author's artistic residency at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in 2014. The artist wanted to show what contemporary Polish Jews – in the case of this series: Warsaw Jews – identify with today, as well as what a diverse community they are. The artist invited contemporary Warsaw residents of Jewish origin who would be willing to pose for a portrait. It was almost only women who volunteered – a series of 19 portraits of women and children was created and displayed around the museum in the form of billboards. The photographs were taken with a medium-format analogue camera, mainly at the residence of the portrayed, which was also a deliberate artistic strategy. Five photographs enriched the collection of the POLIN Museum. The author's grandparents come from southern Poland, so she also went to the places they once lived in (Pacanów and Klimontów). There she also took a series of photographs, constituting a more personal, and to some extent autobiographical, complement to the Warsaw series.
Jasmine Bakalarz – born in 1985 in Buenos Aires, she completed her Bachelor's degree at Concordia University in Montreal, specialising in photography, and her Master's degree in Arts in Public Spheres at École Cantonale d'art du Valais in Sierre, Switzerland. Her work has been exhibited and awarded in the Americas, Europe and Asia, and is part of private and public collections, as well as the Foto-Feminas platform for Latin American women photographers. In collaboration with several institutions, in 2015 she developed the NS-Photography Exchange Project, a platform where artists in Canada and Argentina collaborate online to create photo-based projects. The artist was also selected for the first World Press Photo Masterclass competition in Latin America in Mexico City. As a photographer, she mainly focuses on documenting the lives of women and children in different social settings, and depicts issues of gender, identity, diaspora, exile and migration. Her area of research and curatorial projects includes collective action, public intervention and human rights issues related to genocide and memory. Specialising in portraits, she is the author of a series of photographs documenting the lives of children in different social environments.
Małgorzata Bogdańska-Krzyżanek
