A talk with images, stories, movies, sounds – by Monika Bulaj

Welcome to KIN. It is a lot to take in. So, a little by little. Tonight we journey with people, into places rarely seen in such tenderness. We are very humbled to have the esteemed Polish photographer, writer, reporter and TED fellow with us to present an amazing show of her photos, travels, ideas and kinships.

Monika’s beautiful, moving and painting-like photographs blur religious and cultural divisions, re-imagining identites and blurring borders. In this multi-media story telling presentation we travel to areas of the world in which Monika sees the sacred do away with frontiers and places where faiths meet, zones besieged by armed fanatics, places where homelands lost and where resources are shared. She creates such strong portraits, showing the power of photography and seeing the world afresh. It’s a celestial map that ignores the barriers built by the advocators of global conflict.

With this feature length presentation, Monika brings us a parallel world, a rarely reported one, ranging from Central Asia to Latin America, from Russia to the Middle East, that glimmers with evocative images in colour and black and white and finds the beauty that lies in contamination: the Dionysian rites of Muslims in Maghreb, the mourn of deads in the Balkans, the pilgrimages in the mud on the Urals, the evocation of the gods in exile overseas. She documents the ‘smugglers’ of the past, in Haiti and Cuba, where the spiritual strength of Mother Earth becomes ritual voodoo, santeria, mystical rap, samba, epithalamium and mystery.

Monika is constantly on the move, way out there, often out of touch, but we are glad we found her and she us.

Please note: Weekend passes include entry to the opening evening, but not to Monika Bulaj’s auditorium show. Separate tickets to this are available.