Exhibitions

Every book has its own card in the library catalog. Every brochure, magazine, map, poster, even a card. It does not matter whether it is a paper card or an online card. The information on both is always the same. They are like signposts. Thanks to them, we can find the item we are looking for on the shelf. The card tells us everything: how many pages the book has, its size in centimeters, where and when it was published and in what language. Whether it can be borrowed and what its reference number or classification is. Thanks to them, you can search for books by author, title or subject, which makes it easier to quickly find interesting materials.

The exhibition "Written in the Cards. 55 Years of the University of Gdańsk" is a selection of 55 cards from the card catalog and online catalog of the University of Gdańsk Library. The works of UG lecturers described on these cards have been collected by the Library since its inception. By looking at the cards, we follow the history of our university.
The exhibion is presented  in the Main Library from March 18, 2025. 

Curator of the exhibition: dr. Katarzyna Wawrzynkowska
Graphic design: Dominika Skutnik
Cooperation: Katarzyna Dunajska

It is remarkable exhibition of photographs by Dominika Rafalska, which is on display in the Library Gallery of the University of Gdańsk.

The exhibition can be viewed until April 17, 2025.

The author of the work writes:

"The background consisted entirely of the dark silhouettes of church domes and roof tops; the bridge arched over the black curvature of the water, both ends of which were cut off by infinity. At night, a sense of the infinity of unfamiliar territories is given by the last street lamp and just such a lamp was shining twenty metres away. It was very quiet. From time to time there was the vague light of a boat raking nearby..."

These words by Yosif Brodsky, written in the essay The Watermark, accompanied me on my - half realistic, half magical - trip to Venice....

In February 2024, I landed at Venice's Marco Polo Airport, equipped only with my hand luggage, which consisted mainly my camera, a few notebooks and the aforementioned book. The fog was so thick that I still wondered for a long time how the pilot had managed to land. However, I was filled with joy because I had deliberately travelled to Venice against a common way: in winter, after Carnival, in search of cool, wintry, austere scenery. I wanted to capture in my frames Venice where solitude and silence can be found.

Venice is still a place not of this earth. A city resounding with the music of Vivaldi. Smelling of seaweed. Obscure. Empty. A city so cramped that the proper sense of perspective is lost. A place where you have to put on a wide-angle lens. And on winter days, the camera gets ‘silly’ trying to set the right white balance parameters.

I wanted to show Venice ‘off the beaten track’, a city where Canaletto's paintings recur, because everything there is a veduta. The atmosphere of mystery is completed by the fog, which can be so thick that you can get lost in it literally a few steps away. From the middle of St Mark's Square you cannot see the basilica, but you know it is there. A lot is going on in the world of understatement, illusion and imagination.

My photographs take viewers to a Venice seen ‘my way’, the city where single metres of waterfront can be ‘picturesque’. The city that can be so empty that sometimes you have to wait several minutes to find a person to complete the frame in a photograph.

It is also a tribute to slowness, concentration, contemplation, a search for references to the paintings of the old masters, voices from the past... I find unbelievably sad something that I have included in the title of this exhibition: Venice is disappearing. Trampled underfoot by the shoes of day-trippers, flooded by the waves of the lagoon, reduced to a banality: a postcard view, a carnival mask or an attractive magnet. A transit city... I will ask after Milan Kundera: ‘Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared?’... On those grey winter days when I walked alone through Venice, this question also accompanied me. I hope I have managed to capture this slowness in my frames....

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Dominika Rafalska: journalist, editor, researcher. Photography is my passion, an escape from reality and a journey into myself. In my frames, I try to capture the transience of the world and what we often fail to see.

Contact: https://www.instagram.com/dominika_rafalska/ https://www.facebook.com/dominika.rafalska.7

The Law Library invites to the exhibition ‘55 years of the Faculty of Law and Administration of the University of Gdansk’. You will have the opportunity to see archival press materials and photographs depicting the history of the faculty from its inception to the present day.
Co-ordinators: Agnieszka Bielinowicz, Marzena Loroff

The exhibition will be available until April,30,  2025.

Let's go on a journey through time together.