Refusal. Second Fracture

Madrid, Spain

Rafał Milach shows the exact moment those images begin to crack. Contemporary documentary photography, political photography, archive-based practice, visual activism, and expanded photographic installation.

Photo Rafał Milach & Karolina Gembara

Image credit

Rafał Milach & Karolina Gembara, SEEDING, 2018. ©Rafał Milach & Karolina Gembara

Meet the artist

The Movement

Contemporary Art

ArtLovers Tip

Look for the fracture. In every image, ask yourself: where does obedience end and refusal begin? The power of Milach’s work is that it shows resistance not as one heroic moment, but as a slow accumulation of gestures, bodies, archives, and voices that eventually make the official story impossible to believe.

Exhibition Highlights - What you’ll see

Milach (Gliwice, Polonia, 1978) is a full member of Magnum Photos and a key photographer exploring systems of power in contemporary Europe.

Refusal. Second Fracture examines how official narratives are constructed — and how they break. The exhibition begins with the story of Xenia Degelko, a Belarusian activist whose image was absorbed into state propaganda in 2012 after a viral song praising Alexander Lukashenko’s regime. She was presented as part of a symbolic gallery of “winners”: model citizens used to reinforce the State’s image of itself.

But that image fractured. In 2020, Degelko joined the mass protests against widely contested elections in Belarus, revealing how fragile the visual machinery of power can be when individual refusal becomes collective action.

You’re watching:

  • Propaganda images turning against the narratives that produced them
  • Photography as evidence of resistance and social fracture
  • Works such as The Winners and Seeding
  • Murals, flags, videos, and materials from the Archive of Public Protests
  • A visual dialogue between Belarus, Poland, protest, solidarity, and systems of control.

The result feels urgent and political: not photography as passive documentation, but as a tool for exposing how power performs itself.

Worth the trip

Yes — especially if you care about photography as resistance, not just representation.

Because this exhibition shows that images are never neutral. They can be used by power to create obedience, but they can also be reclaimed, disrupted, and turned into tools of protest.

It also connects Belarusian resistance with mobilizations in Poland around women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, the rule of law, and refugee support after the invasion of Ukraine — showing how self-organized networks can respond when institutions fail.

This matters because Refusal. Second Fracture is not only about Eastern Europe. It is about every system that tries to control reality through images — and every body, gesture, archive, and community that refuses to obey.

How to experience it

Don’t look only at the photographs — read the whole visual system: flags, videos, murals, archive materials.

Ask who created each image, who used it, and who later reclaimed it.

Pay attention to repetition: propaganda needs repetition; resistance often begins by interrupting it.

Think about the difference between an individual gesture and a collective movement.

Let the exhibition feel uncomfortable — it is about power losing control of its own image.

Madrid, Spain

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