Rafał Milach. Fermata

From 1 to 30 September 2026 the Royal Łazienki Museum showed Rafał Milach’s photographs of the crowds and backstage moments at three Polish summer music festivals, free of charge, in its Open-Air Gallery on Aleje Ujazdowskie.

The Royal Łazienki Museum on the exhibition:

Dozens of concerts, hundreds of artists and thousands of festival-goers. All summer long Rafał Milach, one of the most highly regarded Polish documentary photographers, watched the audiences at Open’er, Audioriver and BitterSweet Festival. The result is the open-air exhibition “Fermata”. The project, initiated by PKO Bank Polski, the main partner of all three festivals, is an attempt to capture the emotions that arise around music.

“Fermata” can be seen in the Open-Air Gallery on Aleje Ujazdowskie. The photographs on show were taken at three of this year’s music events: Open’er Festival in Gdynia, Audioriver in Łódź and BitterSweet Festival in Poznań. The exhibition is not, however, a record of the individual festivals. Rafał Milach treats them as a space for observing contemporary forms of community - a momentary escape from everyday life, of meeting and of taking part in a collective experience.

People are at the centre of the project. The photographer watches the festival-goers during concerts, between performances, behind the scenes and on the fringes of the main spectacle. He records emotions, relationships and details that often go unnoticed. He also shows a world closed to most of the festival audience. He looks behind the scenes, watching musicians during rehearsals, preparations and moments of concentration just before they walk on stage. This makes “Fermata” not only a story about festivals but above all about people and the emotions that music can evoke.

The title “Fermata” refers to the musical sign that allows a note or a rest to be held beyond the length written in the score. In Rafał Milach’s project the term takes on a metaphorical meaning. The photographs arrest fleeting moments and let us look at what usually goes unnoticed in the rhythm of a festival.

Showing “Fermata” in the grounds of the Royal Łazienki gives the photographs an additional context. The open-air display places the festival community in the historic setting of a royal residence, setting a contemporary musical experience against a place with centuries of history.

The “Fermata” project was initiated by PKO Bank Polski, the main partner of Open’er, Audioriver and BitterSweet Festival. It sums up this year’s festival summer, during which PKO Bank Polski co-created events combining popular and classical music, including “Chopin at Open’er”, the premiere concert NERVY at Audioriver and the closing project “BITTER Chopin, SWEET Chopin” at BitterSweet Festival.

What to expect

The museum placed its Open-Air Gallery on Aleje Ujazdowskie, the long avenue running south from the city centre to Łazienki Park, and admission was free.

There were no stages or stars on the panels, only people: audiences during and between concerts, and musicians rehearsing or waiting to go on. The pictures were taken in summer 2026 at Open’er in Gdynia, Audioriver in Łódź and BitterSweet Festival in Poznań, but the museum stressed that this was not a record of the festivals themselves.

The museum did not give the number of photographs or name a curator.

It is worth knowing who was behind it. The project was initiated by PKO Bank Polski, the main partner of all three festivals, and the museum described it as a summing-up of the festival summer the bank co-created. The bank’s own press release names Fotofestiwal, the international photography festival in Łódź, as the project partner.

Context

Rafał Milach was born in Gliwice in 1978 and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice. In 2006 he co-founded Sputnik Photos, a collective of Central and Eastern European photographers, and in 2019 the Archive of Public Protests, which documents protest movements in Poland. He has been associated with Magnum Photos since 2018.

His work mostly deals with the tension between society and power, and his book “Strike” won the Author Book Award at Rencontres d’Arles in 2022. “Fermata” was a change of subject: instead of protesters, a crowd that came for the music.

What the press says

The project initiator’s press release (in Polish):

• MojeBankowanie.pl, PKO Bank Polski press release (3.09.2026): the bank presents the show as the crowning of its festival summer, and Milach says he looked for the moments that happen between concerts - press release

Updates

• 2026-10-01 - the exhibition closed on 30 September 2026; the museum announced no extension (source: exhibition page, list of open-air exhibitions, both in Polish).

See also

• Heliograms in the Solomon Room. In Search of Light - in the Palace on the Isle until 31 January 2027: Nicolas Grospierre’s heliograms fill the empty frames of Bacciarelli paintings burned in 1944 and change as the sunlight falls on them; another image made with light, elsewhere in Łazienki.
• Together. 20 Years of the Sputnik Photos Collective - the collective Milach co-founded, shown at the Museum of Photography in Kraków; closed on 13 September 2026.

After the show

The same Open-Air Gallery on Aleje Ujazdowskie shows Stills from the Film Lalka (The Doll) until 31 October 2026, also free: stills from Maciej Kawalski’s new adaptation of Bolesław Prus’s classic Warsaw novel. Anyone who came to Łazienki for “Fermata” will find another photography show on panels in the same spot. The film’s costumes are on display until 13 December 2026 in Chic and Conventions. Costumes from the Film “The Doll”, in the Palace on the Isle, the Myślewicki Palace and the Old Orangery.

Other current shows in Warsaw on music and photography:

• What Is This Queue For? The Polish People’s Republic in a Musical Mirror - at the Polish History Museum until 6 December 2026; the history of communist Poland told through its popular music of 1944-1989, a look at what music meant to its audiences a few decades earlier.
• Transformations. Old and New Photography from the Collections of the Asia and Pacific Museum - at the Asia and Pacific Museum until 24 January 2027; 80 photographs from the museum’s archive set out in 40 thematic pairs, for anyone who wants more photography after “Fermata”.

Museum profile: Royal Łazienki Museum.