Skip to main content
All Posts By

admin

The Library

By All Works, catoptric chests, collections, mise-en-abyme

The Library project is not the representation of a specific library, but rather an attempt at representing the very essence of the idea of a library. It is loosely inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ novel The Library of Babel, where the author describes the universe as an “infinite and cyclic” library. The project is thus an attempt at showing, through a photographic installation, the library as an infinite gathering of books, but that can be contained in a single book.

If one assumes that a library has three main functions, that is to gather books, to stock them and archive them, and to make them available to the public, it is possible to phrase the following statements. First, as a library is, by nature, a place where books are gathered, it is potentially infinite, because books, and thus knowledge, knows no boundaries and is constantly expanding. And second, a library may contain a book on libraries, or even the list of all books in that particular library, which means that a library is simultaneously the container and the content of the same subject matter

The Library is a photographic installation developed upon the above-mentioned propositions. In its simplest form, the installation is composed of six elements (photographic objects and installations) laid down in a circle. These elements are the following:

A fake book, i.e. a photographic object imitating one of the books of the library, life size;
A fake bookshelf, i.e. a photograph imitating one of the bookshelves of the library, life size;
The Never-Ending Wall of Books, i.e. a photograph of a bookshelf placed in a light box and shown in mirrors, in order to create the illusion of a wall spreading endlessly in all directions;
The Never-Ending Corridor of Books, i.e. two photographs of bookshelves placed in light boxes and shown in mirrors, in order to create the illusion of a corridor sprawling endlessly;
The library building i.e. a light box representing a miniature library;
A real book, which is the alter ego of the fake book, where one can find a photograph of the miniature library building.

In this setting, watching the installation is like a backward tracking, starting from a book, where each additional step backward places the viewer in a higher position, and ending where it has started.

Read More

The Glass Trap

By All Works, mirrors, modernism, site-specific

In the heart of a deserted office building, Nicolas Grospierre has recreated a dreamlike winter garden. For a few days, before the picturesque, glass and metal structure is destroyed, the artist has devised in its core an illusory and infinite space. The Glass Trap is an attempt at capturing the fleeting soul of a soc-modernist pyramid placed on its head.
The Glass Trap is a premiere for Nicolas Grospierre inasmuch as he has willingly put aside his primary medium, photography, to create a living picture. The extraordinary, illusory winter garden set inside an abandoned 1980’s office building that will shortly be destroyed is a typical site specific installation inspired by the venue, and imagined as an addendum to its history. The glass cube filled with plants is the only living element in a building destined for destruction. The installation is at the same time a kind of mental emergency exit, but also as an amazing kaleidoscope opening in front of the very eyes of the viewer an endless space full of vegetation, in the heart of a massive but absurd (because built upside down) pyramid.
Grospierre finds once again some potential in a meaningful but abandoned and forgotten place, in this way filling up the alternative topography of the city with yet another unsuspected and surprising situation. The meaning and great strength of the artist’s practice lies in his ability to get under the city’s skin and emphasising the idea that a significant aspect of the city is also the space hidden behind the enigmatic facades of the buildings. In this way, Grospierre expands the notion of public space, immersing in an urban game not only us, viewers, but also intimate office spaces, libraries, and administrations.

Lukasz Gorczyca

Read More

The Bank

By All Works, catoptric chests, conceptual photography, photomontage

The Bank is a photographic installation which plays with the idea of the financial institution, where the bank stands as a metaphor of wealth, and more generally, all material things.

The Bank’s key driving ideas are the following : on the one hand, that one is always drawn to what is hidden and concealed, and that one always wants to discover what is behind closed doors. And on the other hand, that apperances may be deceiving.

Practically, the installation consists of series of photographs and of photographic objects which are designed to tickle the viewer’s curiosity and try to discover what is hidden behind the innumerable doors of the Bank.

Formally, the Bank is organised on three sets of elements. First, the viewer is confronted with photographs of deserted and disused New York banks interiors. Second, the viewer enters the vault, which is made out of 10 life size photographs of safe deposit boxes. There are approximately 2000 safe desposit boxes represented in this vault, each one with a number. The numbering of the safe deposit boxes hide a secret message, invisible at first sight, that the viewer is invited to decipher. Third, and finally,the viewer is confronted with the Safe, at the core of the installation. It is a photographic object representing a life size bank safe, whose doors may be openened.

Metaphorically, the Bank is an attempt at tackling the finiteness and illusory character of all material things. Once all doors have been opened, the viewer may well realise that there really is nothing to be found.

Read More

K-Pool i Spółka

By All Works, architectural fantasies, modernism, photomontage

Rem Koolhas, in Delirious New York, ends his book by an imaginary tale about Russian avant-guarde architects, who escaped the Soviet Union to reach New York. The decision to escape the USSR was made in the 1930’s, and the means of transportation was a floating swimming pool, which, when all the architects were swimming synchronically, would move in the opposite direction. Thus, swimming towards Moscow, they only reached Manhattan in the mid-1970’s. Unfortunately for them, the Manhattan of the 70’s had little to do from what they had dreamed of at the onset of their journey.
It is this moving, wonderful and absurd endeavor that inspired me to create K-Pool. K-Pool stands for Koscisuko Pool, an open air swimming pool in Brooklyn, NY (built in 1958-60 by Morris Lapidus), whose intricate design and incredible shapes I used to re-create Rem Koolhas’ vision.

K-Pool i Spółka (which could be translated as “K-Pool and company”), juxtaposes this imaginary swimming pool with real achievements of Soviet Union architects, the very colleagues of those who decided to flee the USSR. While these were swimming, back home, they were erecting astonishing buildings. But also swimming pools, which now, for the majority of them, rest unused, as a final irony to this visual journey.

Read More

Hotel Europejski

By All Works, architecture, documentary

The Europejski Hotel is one of Warsaw’s Palace hotels. Built in the 1870s, and left almost untouched by the war, it was nationalised by the communist regime and remained then one of the most prestigious hotels belonging to the Tourism State Company, Orbis. It was only in 2005 that the former owners of the hotel, the Potocki family, were given it back. The hotel currently awaits renovation, since the verdict reprivatising the hotel stated that it could not be used as a hotel until 2008. However, before handing back the hotel to the Potockis, the Orbis Corporation took away all of the furniture and interior decoration it could possibly take. The hotel is thus at the moment an empty shell, with all of its rooms unused.

The Hotel Europejski project is a systematic inventory of the hotel rooms. All of the photographs were framed and shot likewise. In this way, one may easily notice that there are only three variables in the very sober decoration of the rooms: the carpet, the general arrangement of the walls, and the ceiling height. And yet it seems there are countless possible combinations, since although it is difficult to distinguish one room from the other, they are in fact all different.

Read More

The revolution eats its own…

By All Works, photographic objects, collections, conceptual photography, site-specific

The Revolution eats its own… is a site specific piece commissioned to celebrate the 21th anniversary of the first free elections of June 1989 in Poland.

The piece was located in the historic printing house Dom Slowa Polskiego, which in the 1950’s printed communist propaganda, and in the early 1990’s the first non-communist newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza. However, with the economic changes that occured in Poland after 1989, this printing house has been shut down, as the value of its site being far greater than itslef, and a new office complex will take its place.

The Revolution eats its own… is a visual and photographic comment to this situation. Georg Büchner said that a revolution is like Saturn, it devours its own children, and it seems the capitalist one is no exception to that rule. The printing house is currently in the process of selling all its assets, be it its land, walls, or machines. In a way, it has been a victim of its own activity, as it is the freedom (be it political, but also economic), that it has promoted (with the printing of Gazeta Wyborcza), that has led to its demise.

I have chosen to photograph different parts of the printing house : machines, furniture, walls, and present them as three-dimensional objects that actually look like books, from a distance. They are displayed in an exhibition cabinet that was used to show the printing house’s products, since it seems that they are the few remaining things that the printing house is capable of producing.

Read More

Milk Bars

By All Works, architecture, documentary

The «milk bars» are a network of low cost restaurants, spread all over Poland. Created at the end of the 1950s, under socialist Poland, and belonging then to the State Cooperative Spolem, milk bars were largely privatised after 1989, but remain partly state financed today. In this way, milk bars continue to be places where people with little money (students, old age pensioners, but also homeless people) may eat well, at a low cost. Their name comes from the fact that no alcohol is sold at milk bars, and originally, no meat either. Since the beginning of the 2000s, milk bars have received heavy competition from western style fast-food restaurants, and consequently they have started to disappear, one after the other.

Read More

Heliograms

By All Works, anthropocene, conceptual photography, solar

Heliogrammy is photography without the use of a camera, lens, film or paper.
Heliogrammy uses the rays of the sun, to draw abstract shapes on material.
Heliogrammy is a visual game, using the idea of low-technology photography, and simply making use of the discolouring power of the rays of the sun.

Read More

Paper Planes

By All Works, architecture, conceptual photography, photomontage

The exhibition’s starting point was the Polish Aviation in Cracow, designed in 2010 by the Berlin architect Justus Pysall, in partnership with ARUP. Paper Planes was inspired by this building, and is an interpretation of it, its origin, its function and its form. The work was initiated with the acknowledgment that a) the building was designed as if it was made as an origami, a paper cut-out from a square area, and b) that the end result is a shape that looks at the same time like a gigantic aircraft propeller or a flying wing, both shapes associated with the idea of flight. Grospierre’s process in this exhibition was two-fold. First, it consisted of photographing all the actual building’s surfaces (concrete walls, rooftop, windows and floors) to “recreate” the original square out of which the building was cut-out. It is thus the reverse track that led to the actual building: going from the real material and photographing it to produce the original square that was used to create the museum’s design. Second, using the obtained square as an imaginary piece of paper, printing this square on photographic paper and creating real paper planes out of it. The end result of the work consisted of 2 sets of photographs and photographic objects:

1) photographs of the museum, showing its transformation from an architectural design into the original square

2) 5 different paper airplanes, all made out of the double-sided photograph which represents the flattened out building.

In addition, viewers were invited to create their own paper plane, made from the flattened out building printed on regular-sized sheets of paper. Throughout the show, which lasted from March to July 2011 at the Phase 2 exhibition space in the ARUP Headquarters in London, more than 800 miniature paper planes were created.

Read More

Mausoleum

By All Works, collections, site-specific

In the Mausoleum, Grospierre and Mokrzycka reproduced on a life-size scale the private collection of stuffed animals of Nugzar Dzanishia, who shot them and stuffed them all by himself. More precisely, this collection of 700 animals is the only “living” space of a huge cultural and commercial complex of the 1970’s, now abandonned under the Republic Square in Tblisi, Georgia. Grospierre and Mokrzycka then transfered this photographic frieze in the abandonned underground club-lounge below the Tribune at the foot of the Palace of Culture in Warsaw, where the Communist dignitaries used to assist at the military parades on May 1st. The 15 metre long frieze takes us not only to another place, but also back in time. It is a reference to the wunderkammer of old, but also to the time when propaganda kept hidden what was happening in real life. In this way the stuffed animals, placed in the social realistic interiors of the Tribune are relics of a past, which, not without any reason, is currently being burried.

Read More