Erazm Ciołek was a Polish photojournalist, mostly known for his photographs of the Polish Solidarity movement. The bulk of the collection consists of Ciołek's photographs taken between the birth of Solidarity in 1980 and the collapse of state socialism in Poland in 1989. These works document the legendary strike at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk in 1980, the martial law period in Poland, opposition protests and demonstrations, the Round Table Talks between the opposition and the party regime, and Solidarity's victory in the partly free elections of 4 June 1989. The remaining photos depict the beginnings of democratic rule in Poland and post-Ceaușescu Romania, which the photographer visited in 1990-91. The collection also includes portfolios of photographic reproductions, flyers and catalogues of Ciołek's exhibitions.
This immense archive of over 170.000 photographs is a unique account of economic, political, sport, cultural and everyday life in socialist Poland of the 1950s and the 1960s. They are the life’s work of photographer Eustachy Kossakowski. The collection contains press reportages created in cooperation with socio-cultural magazines, documentation of artistic life including exhibitions, happenings, installations, theatre spectacles and environment art, as well as the social life of artists. The archive also includes conceptual photography projects, which brought Kossakowski recognition in France in 1970s.
The “Exploitation of the Dead“ Collection by the self-educated neo-avantgarde artist Mladen Stilinović was compiled in socialist Croatia in the period from 1984 to 1990. It is a cycle of paintings dealing with the theme of dispersal or disappearance of symbols, both those widely accepted, such as the Christian cross, as well as the symbols of the Yugoslav socialist period, such as the red star. The author detects changes that affected the socialist system at the symbolic level in the 1980s and puts them in the context of art in a subversive way by using ideological and political reality.
