INDEPENDENT PARTICLES – POLISH CONTRCULTURE (1967 – 1975)

The exhibition INDEPENDENT PARTICLES – POLSKA KONTRKULTURA (1967 – 1975) is a collection of photographs from the archives of Kamil Sipowicz, Tomasz Sikora, Ryszard Borek, Jacek Szmuc, Piotr Marek, Stefan Okołowicz and KwieKulik Archive. The curator of the exhibition is Kamil Sipowicz.

The exhibition is an attempt to present a social diagnosis that shows the cultural, or rather counter-cultural, dimension of the party-police contestation at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s. The rebellion of hippies, outsiders and independent artists against the socialist stabilization of the communist regimes of Gomułka and Gierek turned into a highly destructive “distributed revolution”.
The phenomenon of the hippie floral and pacifist revolution in Poland has never been commercialized, as it happened with the counterculture in the West. The most important ideas of this movement were freedom, love and peace. The exhibition is a collection of visual stories about individual stories of hippies and hippies – mothers and fathers of the Polish hippie movement. Women occupy a special place in this collection – they have so far been ignored in Polish research and publications. Let us mention a few of those brave girls who were not afraid to manifest their freedom in the totalitarian regime: Kora (Olga Ostrowska), Galia (Grażyna Sewiołek), Gracja (Grażyna Wychowaniaska), Aśka (Dmyszewicz), Alicja (Sierszulska), Dolores (Ewa Prokop) ) and hundreds of others.
Polish hippies were the first color revolution in country. They wanted to live their own lives outside the norms devised by the ubiquitous regime. Many of them took part in the great artistic events of those years. They collaborated and were an inspiration for such artists as Kantor, Bereś, Grotowski, Stażewski, Kwiek / Kulik, Warpechowski, Broll, Urbanowicz. The photographs collected at the exhibition are a visible seed of a number of positive phenomena, such as avant-garde theater, ecology or social independence, whose impressive consequences can be seen today – from the perspective of almost half a century!