Olka Osadzińska

Olka Osadzińska

Artist

Olka Osadzińska is a Berlin-based artist, creative director and curator from Warsaw. She has worked on various international art projects o ver the past ten years, creating illustrations and designs for a wide range of fashion and lifestyle brands as well as for glossy publications such as Elle, Harper's Bazaar, Commons&Sense or Highsnobiety.

The World of Yesterday

Stefan Zweig
As a Viennese star witness and avid European, Stefan Zweig writes longingly about the heyday of the old continent until it burnt in the hellfire of World War II.

The lesson Zweig teaches you is as beautiful as it is painful. „My today is so much different than all my yesterdays; I have risen and fallen so often, that sometimes I feel as if I have lived not just one but several lives. When I say, without thinking, ‘my life’, I often find myself instinctively wondering which life.” And: „But if we can salvage only a splinter of truth from the structure of its ruin, and pass it on to the next generation by bearing witness to it, we will not have lived entirely in vain.” Read it, and live as if yesterday and today were the only things you could really own.

Olka Osadzińska

Diary 1954

Leopold Tyrmand
The year 1954: Stalin was dead but Stalinism not yet. Leopold Tyrmand, a dandy, lived in a Warsaw which was slowly beginning to breathe. Half document, half elaborate, stylized literary diary, this book is a window through which we gaze at a fascinating spectacle: how human life can be reborn after catastrophes.

Written in 1954 and only fully published in 1999 Tyrmand’s diary is not only an introduction to Warsaw, the way my generation imagines it, based on the photos of Tadeusz Rolke, Wajda’s and Polanski’s movies and accompanied by Komeda’s jazz – it’s a diary of a sensitive intellectual. Notes on life, relationships, artists’ struggles – and human ones too. This is what I think of Warsaw and how I experience it; what I think of Polish intellectual history and what I think of choices we’re facing every day – something that has not changed in almost 70 years – trying to figure out what matters in life, while strolling the streets of a city that once was, and isn’t anymore.

Olka Osadzińska

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