Resetting the school system is one of the unfinished tasks of our time and perhaps one of the most complicated. Karolina Wojtas’s Abzgram project (a nonsense word invented by the artist, which, when the letters are rearranged, becomes bazgram, meaning to doodle or to draw aimlessly in Polish) takes as its starting point the rigidity of the Polish education system and the artist’s own childhood experiences. She recalls being “confined” by countless, almost military rules of conduct that limited the development of her creativity and imposed a very narrow idea of what could be considered art. With its saturated colours and delirious compositions, Abzgram responds to this iron discipline with a visual act of revenge, imagining what a different sort of school would be like. A school that fosters imagination, fun, humour, and the development of expressive abilities, that sees learning as a process of personal experimentation and that even questions whether education is truly necessary or if other ways of acquiring and applying knowledge can be invented.
Born in Poland in 1996, Karolina Wojtas graduated from the Lodz Film School and the Institute of Creative Photography in the Czech Republic. In the summer of 2019, she opened her own museum in her hometown in Poland. Wojtas has exhibited her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Poland and internationally in Foam Amsterdam (2021), Noorderlicht International Photography Festival (2020), Naga Gallery in Warsaw (2020) or Bratislava Photography Month (2019). Awards and recognitions for her work include a nomination for the EMoP Arendt 2023 award, reGeneration 4: The Challenges of Photography and its Museum for Tomorrow at the Musée de l’Elysée, a special mention at Plat(f)orm 2020 at the Fotomuseum Winterthur, the C/O Berlin Award (2022), the ING Unseen Talent Award (2019) in Amsterdam, and the Tiff Open (2018) at the Tiff Festival Wrocław. Her work has been featured in The Guardian, Internazionale, The British Journal of Photography, Lampoon Magazine, L’uomo Vogue, Superpaper, Tampon – Ordinary Magazine, Causette, and Das Magazin Switzerland.
Getxophoto is an image festival created and managed by Begihandi, that has been taking place in Getxo—Basque Country, Euskadi—since 2007. This festival is part of a cultural ecosystem with the aim of being more participatory, hybrid, committed and sustainable. This thematic Festival is conceived as a platform that addresses contemporary challenges through different proposals, from visual storytellers around the world, in an attempt to create spaces for reflection and establish a collective conversation. Getxophoto is characterized by the radical defense of public space (both physical and online). For this reason, most of its programme is composed of outdoor installations, highlighting, on the one hand, the link between the image and the environment and, on the other, generating a more horizontal and participatory relationship with the public.
This year, after PAUSE, PLAY and REC, the festival reaches a milestone: its 20th edition. The common thread for this anniversary edition could only be… RESET—a button that invites us to reboot the system. Anniversaries are moments to celebrate and rejoice, but also excellent opportunities to look back and take stock, to review our archives and get a glimpse of what we have changed; and equally a time to project forward with renewed energy, just as when soil is ploughed so that seeds can be sown again. The edition therefore welcomes proposals that address experiences of change, reworking, recycling and reinvention; of life cycles and celebrations; of individual or collective stories of resetting—a system reboot in any of its many forms.
María Ptqk is the curator of GETXOPHOTO 2026.
Copyright © Karolina Wojtas and Getxophoto, all rights reserved
