White Balance

The project will reflect the landscape of an African village exhibited nearby at the National Museum. The presented photos will be a documentation of items from the historical Szczecin "African Collection", currently divided between the National Museum in Szczecin and the Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw.


The historically formulated universalist, internationalist, and humanistic postulates during the communist period will be confronted with contemporary postcolonial reflection. It forces us to read the collections of African artifacts scattered around Europe as symbols of the white man's absolute cultural domination.

The title concept of white balance used in digital photography will be treated as a metaphor for the deconstruction of "balance" and "order" that the colonizers carried out for centuries on African cultures. Simultaneously, the way the photos are displayed and their specially prepared, colored lighting will directly relate to the white visual balance. It will show the ambiguity and discretion of what we used to interpret as white and non-white. It is hard to find a better context for such a project than the white interior landscape of the Philharmonic in Szczecin.