October 22, 2026–April 25, 2027
Nine Moons traces the commodity routes, supply chains, and labour networks that underpinned the modern development of Łódź, a principal centre of textile manufacturing in Poland and Eastern Europe. Following these circuits from the mid-nineteenth century through the industry’s post-1989 collapse, the project outlines a distinct geography which saw manufacturers in Łódź develop an enduring dependency on raw fibre from Central Asia—territories comprising today’s Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan.
This transcontinental axis originated during the American Civil War, when a naval blockade caused a global cotton famine, severing local mills from slave plantations in the American South. Seeking alternative sources, textile factory owners turned east, profiting directly from the Russian tsarist conquest of Central Asia in the late nineteenth century. Through successive decades, Central Asian fields and Łódź factories operated as complementary nodes: forged initially under the Russian Empire and later preserved through the planned economies of the Soviet bloc.
Visual media actively forged the ideological narrative of cotton modernity. This exhibition positions photography and film as both historical artefacts and critical lenses. It pairs nineteenth-century documentation by Polish explorer Leon Barszczewski—whose ethnographic surveys facilitated Russian imperial expansion—with twentieth-century perspectives from the Soviet era: Max Penson’s monumental portrayals of new irrigation infrastructure and cotton harvest contrasted with Lotte Jacobi’s more intimate records of gruelling labour on the ground.
Equally significant is the ambivalent role of the Soviet and Polish avant-gardes in defining this aesthetic. Figures such as Alexander Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, and Dziga Vertov, alongside Władysław Strzemiński and Karol Hiller, were initially captivated by industrial pace and mechanization, across both Soviet Asia and interwar Poland. However, ultimately, this radical visual language was subsumed by totalitarian propaganda, weaponised to conceal systemic exploitation, state violence, and terror.
From its inception, this imperial integration was propelled by an insatiable demand for arable land and water resources essential to cotton monoculture. The ensuing ecological catastrophe—culminating in the desiccation of the Aral Sea into a toxic, saline desert—stands as a direct consequence of an extractivist regime imposed upon the territory. By juxtaposing early ethnographic records and modernist literary texts with digital cartography, the exhibition lays bare these structural continuities.
Behind this vast ecological overhaul lay an intensely gendered division of labour. Women formed the core harvesting force in the fields of the Fergana Valley and the whole of southern Central Asia, just as female millhands constituted the vast majority of the shopfloor workforce in Łódź. The exhibition foregrounds a number of women’s perspectives, including the Uzbek “shock worker” Tursunoy Akhunova, while the title pays homage to the nine moons motif emblazoned across traditional suzani—hand-embroidered dowry textiles that embodied symbols of continuity, prosperity and cosmic balance.
This distinct cotton geography finally fractured in 1989, reuniting both regions in a shared yet divergent rupture. While Poland underwent rapid, unregulated privatisation that shuttered the mills of Łódź, Uzbekistan retained a state-run cotton monopoly dependent on coercive labour. The exhibition concludes with contemporary works confronting these enduring legacies, presenting the documentary photography of Timur Karpov and Umida Akhmedova alongside Dilyara Kaipova’s textiles, which interrogate the persistent presence of cotton across public and visual culture today.
Curators: Dorota Jagoda Michalska, Łukasz Mojsak
The exhibition features artworks, photographs, and archival materials from: Nabi Agzamov, Raikul Ahmatova, Umida Akhmedova, Janina Baranowska, Leon Barszczewski, Angela Davis, Khudaibergen Devanov, Jan Glijer, Juliusz Grot, Veronika Hapchenko, Karol Hiller, Langston Hughes, Saodat Ismailova, Anna Ivanova, Lotte Jacobi, Bruno Jasieński, JP I (Jana Shostak, Piotr Adamski), Aziza Kadyri, Dilyara Kaipova, Oleg Karpov, Timur Karpov, Jerzy Krawczyk, Audre Lorde, Shukhrat Makhmudov, Almagul Menlibayeva, Stanisław Notarjusz, Max Penson, Stanisław Poznański, Alexander Rodchenko, Zohra Saed, Varvara Stepanova, Władysław Strzemiński, Tytus Szabelski-Różniak, Anna Świrszczyńska, Viktor Turin, Dziga Vertov, Marek Włodarski (Henryk Streng), Julita Wójcik, Zaza Zakhidov, Antoni Zdebiak.
New artistic commissions: Veronika Hapchenko, Tytus Szabelski-Różniak, and the duo JP I (Jana Shostak and Piotr Adamski).
