According to one of the legends, the Vistula River was formed from the merging of two mountain streams that marked the route of an expedition of sisters, daughters of the ruler of Beskid, from Barania Góra to the distant Baltic Sea. The girls were to cross the Polish land together with the waters of the two springs and, having reached the sea, never to return home again. Vibrations and Afterimages by Rafał Siderski and Małgorzata Lebda is an intermedia exhibition with the Vistula, a living and important heroine of Polish cultural identity, at its centre.

The river as an entity in itself exists autonomously from the human order and easily escapes subordination to words or images. In Rafał Siderski's photographs, the Vistula becomes a guide to a terrain and life far removed from the everydayness of human experience. Taken from the perspective of an alert observer, the landscapes focus on the beauty and exuberance of the riverside world. They are an attempt at a non-anthropocentric view, particularly relevant in times of recurring climatic crises, fundamentally changing the face of modernity.

The exhibition is accompanied by photographs by Rafał Siderski and a new, previously unpublished text by Małgorzata Lebda. The works are accompanied by the author's publication Dopływy, vibrations, afterimages and songs on the banks published in 2024, and based on the experience of accompanying the river during the poet's 1113-kilometre run along the Vistula in 2021.

Magłorzata Lebda (born 1985)
Poet, grew up in the Beskid village of Żeleźnikowa Wielka. Columnist. Cultural animator. Editor. Researcher. Doctor of humanities and audiovisual arts. Lecturer at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. Author of six books of poetry, including the award-winning volumes Matecznik and Sny uckermärkerów (Gdynia Literary Award, 2019), Mer de Glace (Wisława Szymborska Award, 2022). Her books have been published in translation into Czech, Italian, Serbian, Ukrainian, Slovenian, Danish, Romanian. Ultramarathoner (in September 2021, she covered a distance of 1113 kilometres along the Vistula River by running the activist-poetry project 'Reading Water'). The novel Greedy is her prose debut. The book was awarded the Empik Discovery Award, the Wielkopolska Readers' Literary Award and was nominated for the Conrad Prize; it was also in the final of the Angelus (2024) and Nike (2024) Central European Literature Award.

Rafał Siderski (born 1984)
Visual artist working mainly with photography. He completed his doctoral studies at the Institute of Creative Photography in Opava. Currently works as an assistant professor at the Jan Długosz University in Częstochowa. He is a co-author of the Albom initiative dealing with digitisation and work on photographic archives. In 2019, he published the book Leave Stay, and in 2024 the book Dopływy, vibrations, afterimages and songs on the banks was premiered. Author of numerous exhibitions in Poland and abroad (Italy, Germany, Japan, France).