Mind of Winter
by Karolina Gembara
This project can be seen this year
at Fotofestiwal, which takes place from June 19 to June 28 in Łódź, Poland.
The full program is available here.
Mind of Winter is a photobook project about the forced displacements that redrew Central and Eastern Europe after 1945. That year, at Potsdam, the Western Allies and the Soviet Union shifted Poland’s borders westward: the country lost its eastern provinces — today’s western Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania — and was given formerly German territory in the west.
Whole populations were then moved to fit the new map. Germans were expelled westward;
Poles displaced from the lost east were resettled into the houses the Germans had just been forced to abandon. It was a chain reaction of expulsion, euphemised by Poland’s communist state as “repatriation” to the “Recovered Territories,” and then largely silenced for three generations.
Working from the perspective of that third generation, the project approaches the history not through testimony but through what it leaves behind: inherited objects of uncertain origin, family albums altered by their successive owners, and official archives that catalogue timber and ruins more readily than people.
Several archival findings structure the project. One is a colour photograph from a family archive showing my great-grandparents, their children and grandchildren posing in front of a farmhouse together with a German family — descendants of those who had owned the house my family settled in after 1945. Such visits were not unusual: members of my family also travelled to present-day Ukraine to visit the house they had been forced to leave, meeting and photographing themselves with its new inhabitants. This reciprocity — relationships forged by ordinary people that exceed the divisions imposed by politics, borders and historical narratives — became one of the project’s central organising principles.
Another key document is a 1945 letter from a relative urging his family to leave their home in what is now western Ukraine for the former German territories soon to become western Poland; they followed his advice, only to learn that he had died days after sending it. The project also includes photographic reenactments based on archival images, among them a young girl repeating the gestures of toddlers in a photograph from the Institute for Western Affairs showing refugee children at play — an image that raises questions about how experiences of displacement persist across generations and continue to shape political imagination and social reality in the region.
Photography is used here as a tool of research rather than illustration, and the work moves deliberately between document and fabulation — reconstructing, from fragments and evidence, what the record no longer holds.
The project form mirrors the structure of memory itself: fragmentary, non-linear, built from rhythm and absence. Begun in 2015 and carried through Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Mind of Winter finds its buried history reactivated in the present — the same borderlands under fire again, the same fears mobilised anew.
Every object it gathers now holds several incompatible meanings at once — taken and recovered, lost and found — and the project sets out to let them speak without resolving which story is the true one.
