This exhibition brought together over 250 photographs by Włodzimierz Puchalski – one of the most famous Polish naturalists of all time. We showcased many of his masterly animal portraits, mainly chosen from the extensive collection of the artist’s work at the Niepołomice Museum, near Kraków. These were exhibited alongside a selection of his photographs of pre-war Lviv, enabling his legacy to be assessed anew. Indeed, the way Puchalski shaped the public imagination on how to commune with nature was unrivalled in 20th-century Poland, bearing parallels with Sir David Attenborough’s impact on the British.

The title of the exhibition, Homing, is an academic term for animals’ remarkable ability to find their way home from far-flung locations (the Polish neologism ‘domowroty’ was adopted for the purposes of the project). This was highly pertinent for Puchalski – the show included photographs chronicling research he conducted in 1937 into the migration of storks, focused on the area around the village where he was born, Mosty Wielkie (today in Western Ukraine, Lviv Oblast). The birds’ migration carried a symbolic resonance at the exhibition, which opened just a few months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which saw thousands of Ukrainian citizens flee their homes, often with their pets.

The exhibition was divided into four parts that captured the extraordinarily rich artistic legacy of Włodzimierz Puchalski (1909–1979) – photographer, documentary filmmaker, traveller, polar explorer, and indefatigable populariser of Poland’s native fauna. The selected portraits of animals, both wild and domestic, offered an extremely direct perspective, yet one that was not lacking in subjectivity. The images chosen of wild animals were taken in their natural environment, with no posing, enabling modern viewers to appreciate the significance of this artist, who the international press once referred to as a ‘colossus’.

Puchalski’s technically brilliant photographs have enormous scientific and didactic value, while simultaneously being full-fledged works of art in their own right. His projects, spanning dozens of photobooks and other publications, a string of documentary films, as well as radio and television programmes, shaped ecological awareness during communist times. Today, a biodiversity crisis is unfolding, with a growing wave of extinctions of flora and fauna, and Puchalski’s oeuvre prompts us to reflect on the consequences of human intereference with the environment.

The exhibition Homing: Włodzimierz Puchalski was one of several ICC projects to explore the relationship between humans and the natural world. In 2020, we hosted the exhibition Plants and Animals: Atlases of Natural History in the Age of Linnaeus, which showed the grip on the imagination that this subject had before the invention of photography. Aspects of the natural world also featured prominently in works by the Surrealist Max Ernst, as presented in the ICC’s exhibition An Ornithologist’s Dreams (2016). The topic of wildness and relations between culture and nature were central to works by Michał Korta, shown in the exhibition The Untamed Has No Words (2024). Meanwhile, the urban landscape of Lviv, as known to Puchalski as a young man, was presented in the exhibition Lviv, 24 June 1937: City, Architecture, Modernism (2018). The book Homing: Włodzimierz Puchalski accompanied the exhibition, and it was published in a trilingual edition (Polish, English and Ukrainian).

From the left: Monika Rydiger, Andrij Bojarov, ph. Paweł Mazur

Curators

Andrij Bojarov

Curator

Monika Rydiger

Curator, International Cultural Centre, Kraków

Curators

Andrij Bojarov

Curator

Artist and freelance curator. His work as an artist is typically characterised as media art or conceptual photography. He has participated in many individual and group exhibitions in Tallinn, Lviv, Kyiv, Warsaw, Poznań, Łódż, Amsterdam, and elsewhere. For many years now, he has also been conducting his own archival and research programme, focused on avant-garde art in Lviv.

Monika Rydiger

Curator, International Cultural Centre, Kraków

Art historian and critic, curator. She curated or co-curated such exhibitions as Hunting Down Modernism: The Prohibited Arts in the Third Reich (2011), Memory: Registers and Territories (2013), MAKOM. Dani Karavan. The Essence of Place (2015), The Logic of the Local: Norwegian and Polish Contemporary Design (2016). She is a member of the Polish section of AICA (International Association of Art Critics), vice president of the Association of Art Historians, Kraków Branch. Author of texts on modern and contemporary art, specialising in sculpture and architecture.

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