We are happy to announce that Kulik-KwieKulik Foundation has completed the first stage of digitizing Zofia Kulik‘s archive (part I), within the frame of the Kultura Cyfrowa program financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland.

Zofia Kulik’s archive, located at the artist’s home in Łomianki, is one of the most diverse and extensive artistic archives in Poland. It consists of thousands of archival objects, including negatives, photographic prints, sculptures, props, ready objects, video and audio cassettes, digital files, paper documents, and other collections. Due to its specificity and uniqueness, the archive digitization project is planned for several years. The current stage includes work on the systematization and structure of the archive, along with the digitization of the series Archive of Gestures (part I), created from 1987–1991. The main theme of Archive of Gestures is the rhetoric of symbols. It is a group of almost 700 photographs of a posing model, which became the source material for many of Zofia Kulik’s later works. The model’s poses – or in Kulik’s terminology, his “gestures” – were taken from the iconography of art history: from ancient vases, through baroque paintings, to propagandistic monuments. Many of these images have never been used in Kulik’s artworks or publicly shown, hence the current demand by researchers for their release. The choice of the Archive of Gestures series as the first group of the project to be digitized was also dictated by questions of conservation. All stages of the project were personally supervised by the artist, which guaranteed access to source information that could be made public in its original form.

Kulik-KwieKulik Foundation plans further work on digitizing and making available other parts of Zofia Kulik’s archive. Simultaneously, another important task of Kulik-KwieKulik Foundation is to establish international cooperation with archives, both state and the private archives of artists.

Individuals and institutions interested in Zofia Kulik’s archive are invited to contact us by email. On request, Kulik-KwieKulik Foundation will provide selected materials.

Co-financed by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage from the Culture Promotion Fund, obtained from subsidies established in games subject to state monopoly, in accordance with Art. 80 sec. 1 of the Act of November 19, 2009 on gambling.