Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on March 24, 2026 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute for an opening reception of the exhibit Light and Whispers: Images and Poems from Poland.
This exhibition brings together two voices of Polish art: the photographer Grzegorz Lityński and the poet Barbara Gruszka-Zych. Each has wandered far within their own landscapes — Grzegorz through the contours of the world, capturing lives and moments with a precise, almost tender eye; Barbara through language, shaping more than twenty volumes of poetry that resonate with memory, longing, and reflection. In recent years, their paths have converged, and a new realm has emerged — a place where image whispers to word, and word answers with light. They call it Light and Whispers.
Their first shared journey, a biography of the filmmaker Krzysztof Zanussi (2024), wove together more than two hundred photographs with poetry and prose, layering life upon life, gaze upon gaze. Later came “Kiss the World” (2025), a photopoetic volume where Barbara’s meditations on love, loss, and mortality find echo in Grzegorz’s symbolic, black-and-white images, each frame a pause, a breath, a reflection. Here, photographs become poetry, and poetry becomes photograph, and between them, a space opens — luminous, delicate, unforgettable. Now they turn to Silesia, a region in Poland — one hundred portraits, each captured by Grzegorz’s lens, each met with Barbara’s poems and prose, responding to the gestures of hands, the glances of eyes, the silent stories that dwell in faces. The forthcoming book, “Stop Time. Silesian Kaleidoscope 1919–2018” (2026, in Polish and German), moves like a river of voices, reflecting Silesia’s identity, its memory, its quiet, persistent passage through time.
Some of the photographs and poems in this exhibition emerge from their earlier Polish photopoetry works — the contemplative “Kiss the World” and the many-voiced “Stop Time. Silesian Kaleidoscope” — carrying their original rhythm, silence, and light into this shared space. Yet the greater part of their photopoetry works on display were born for this exhibition, a delicate dialogue between image and word, forming the luminous core of Light and Whispers.
Please email disability@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.
