Image 1 of Running to the Sun by Antonina Gugała
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Running to the Sun by Antonina Gugała

$30.00

Photographs and prose by Antonina Gugała

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We don’t see anyone we know in the park, and we are completely alone in the playground. On this day, even the usually busy street is empty. The external world exists, but without greater meaning. We are together—in a cocoon, a den, on a cloud, on an island—distanced from others, enclosed within our circle.

An expectant mother finds herself out of sight, out of mind during the pandemic; with eyes tightly shut throughout labor; seeking contact with an infant’s gaze and trying out a toddler’s underfoot line of vision; and straining to keep both in sight on expeditions to the playgrounds and museums of Warsaw. Apertures of nurturing.

In her autobiographical photobook Running to the Sun, artist Antonina Gugała weaves images of moments in time paced to the clock of parenting (an alternately hustling or stalling mechanism) with capsular prose texts detailing motherhood envisioned and navigated through various forms of isolation and societal rupture. And all while molding an evolving identity as artist-researcher and mother-of-two attempting to balance generative practices of creation and caregiving.

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Hear Antonina Gugała read eight capsule texts from Running to the Sun, translated, from the Polish, by Magda Tchorek-Bentall.

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2025
Edition of 500
Translated, from the Polish, by Magda Tchorek-Bentall
132 pages, 16.5×20.5 cm, color offset, binding sewn & glued
Printed on Munken Pure 150 with hot-stamped cover on Pure Rough 300
Designed by Nicole Salnikov
ISBN 978-83-68165-16-6

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Antonina Gugała is an artist and researcher living in Warsaw. Her practice explores photography not only as image and object but as a set of social practices ingrained in everyday life. Projects in this vein have included Warsaw Photographer, at the Archeology of Photography Foundation, and Celina Osiecka: Photographic Services, at the Praga Museum of Warsaw. Photographs included in Running to the Sun have been exhibited at the State Gallery of Art in Sopot, Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, and, most recently, in the exhibition Paper, Scissors, Rock at the Alina Foundation.