The Self-Fulfilling Image aims to create a photograph that is both the result and the cause of its own existence, bringing to life this photograph through a performance. Conceptually, the project takes its cue from the idea of the “self-fulfilling prophecy”, which creates the conditions that makes it become true. At the same time, this photograph takes its inspiration from the “one image story” in the manner of the Renaissance tradition depicting different sequences of the lives of Biblical figures as a visual narrative for a complete story. The Self-Fullfilling Image merges both propositions into single project: a large photograph placed into a specific venue and brought to life through a performance.The “hero” of the photograph is the artist, Nicolas Grospierre. The Self-Fullfilling Image appears at first glance like a simple urban landscape photograph, but is in fact an intellectual game and a commentary on his own situation as an artist in New York. The photograph depicts a wide-angle landscape of a street of Chelsea seen from a bird’s eye view. Chelsea as the heart of the NY art scene. In the first sequence, Nicolas Grospierre is seen walking in the street carrying a huge framed photograph. This photograph is the same one that the viewer is looking at, and which is currently being described. In a second sequence, further down the street, the artist is meeting with someone, a gallerist, to whom he is presenting the photograph. The third sequence represents the opening of Nicolas Grospierre’s exhibition in a gallery: the photograph hangs on a wall of the space, and Nicolas is in discussion with a person, possibly the gallerist. And, finally, in one of the windows of the street buildings, one can distinguish a reflection of a person taking a photograph from the other side of the street: it is the artist taking the picture.The performance is what is actually happening in the third sequence of the photograph, i.e. a real opening of a show, in a Chelsea gallery, with the actual photograph hanging on the wall of the gallery where it is seen hanging in the picture. The actors of the performance are the viewers that came to the opening: they are part of the picture which they are looking at.
Kunstkamera is a photographic installation consisting in an imaginary collection of photographs, shown in an especially designed hexagonal room, and creating a visual and intellectual game for the viewer.The title, Kunstkamera, refers on the one hand to the “Wunderkammer” and “Kunstkammer” of the Renaissance: cabinets of curiosities and art, typologies of extraordinary exhibits aiming at showing the world in miniature. On the other hand, the Kunstkammers were also paintings representing these very cabinets, where the painter would include hidden meanings only readable by the initiated. The Kunstkamera installation contains both the collection of curiosities, in the form of various photographs, and the photograph representing the collection, thus creating a mise en abyme, with the photograph of the collection inside the collection, which is itself represented in a photograph, and so on. Practically, the installation consists of a hexagonal room, with two entrances opposite each other. The room is thus divided in two: the photographs are symmetrically organised with respect the line created by the two entrances.
Each half room contains two side walls, on which are hanging the photographs of the collection, and a central wall displaying the image representing the room itself. The game begins when the viewer gets acquainted with the photographs, the way they are organised on the walls, and what they represent. As in the “kunstkammer” of old, this one contains all sorts of visual and narrative riddles. The topics of the photographs are the keys to these riddles. On the one hand they refer to tradition of the “kunstkammer”, the very fact of collecting, and the narcissistic obsessions related to it. On the other hand, they refer to my own private obsessions as a photographer: my tendency to create symmetries and repetitions, and to use a creative instrument which I felt prisoner of, which is the idea of series in photography.
The very fact of taking pictures in series is a form of collecting and also an obsession, and Kunstkamera is an attempt to embody this idea of series in photography, and ultimately exceed it. That is the reason why the central photograph representing the collection shows different images than those physically hanging on the walls: these are all series whose subsequent images appear only in the mise en abyme of the central photograph. A final and invisible motif consists in that most of the photographs are hoaxes, either visual (what they show is impossible) or narrative (the description I give them is false). Mystification, through digital manipulation, has indeed become an integral part of photography today, and it seemed necessary to me to include some in Kunstkamera, as ultimate riddles for the viewer to discover.
The Picture Which Grows, a project carried out in the apartment of photographer Tadeusz Sumiński is an attempt to confront, in the shape of a photographic installation, the ideas of tidiness and untidiness, the static and the dynamic, order and entropy. It is also a clash of the order informing the archive of Tadeusz Sumiński and a method aiming to disturb this order.
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.
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.
Heliografia is photography without the use of a camera, lens, film or paper.
Heliografia uses the rays of the sun, to draw abstract shapes on material.
Heliografia 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.
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.
The Concrete Jungle installation is an attempt at bringing to life one of my favourite sights, that of plants growing behind windows, usually in staircases or halls of concrete blocks, and seen at night. They always were some kind of living and comforting sight in an overall mineral and aggressive environment.I always thought of it as a splendid subject to photograph. However, as I was thinking about a way of achieving such photographs,
it appeared that the sensuality of living plants was so great that I could not resist the urge of using one, and creating the adequate living conditions in a miniature and claustrophobic concrete block. In parallel, the plant is presented on a photograph, artificialcopyof a living organism. Therefore, the photograph will remind of how the plant looked liked when it was originally installed in its new home, when the real plant will be all but dry leaves.
Addendum
While doing research on greenhouses, I read that 19th century British socialists hated the Crystal Palace (the largest greenhouse ever built, destroyed in the 1930’s), because the attraction it created was so huge it distracted the working classes from making the revolution. Astonishing as this information was, it came as no surprise to me.
The Writing Wall is a photograph representing a concrete wall, on a 1 : 1 scale. I achieved this piece for a friend, a screenplay writer, who asked me to make a him a picture which would inspire him while writing his screenplays. It so happens that my father is also a screenplay writer, and he always used to tell me that there was nothing worse for inspiration, when writing, than to sitwith one’s table by a window opening on a wonderful landscape, and that actually the best was a blank wall. That’s precisely what I decided to achieve for my friend : a wonderful concrete wall.
I travelled to Daugavpils in October 2012, to photograph the town where Mark Rothko was born, and which he left in 1910, at the age of ten, never to return.
Throughout the duration of my stay in Rothko’s native town, I kept asking myself: “to what extent is photography capable of enlightening a man’s life?”. This interrogation stemmed from the awareness that photography’s ever-growing presence in our visual culture has led us to believe that practically everything might be illustrated or even explained by a single image, that the wealth of the world may be accounted by photography, perhaps even that a photograph may come to replace the written word, the narrative, become self-sufficient.
And while I was walking the streets and alleys of Daugavpils, I came to the conclusion that the enlightening power of photography could actually be quite weak, all the more when thinking of the life of a man as Mark Rothko.