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photographic objects

The Glass House

By All Works, photographic objects, modernism

The Glass House has two distinct and yet somewhat similar inspirations.

First, I had been interested in the facade of the Polish National Bank, seen at night, and especially its windows, which showed the most exuberant and diverse display of plants. It looks like an extraordinary burst of green life, brought and kept to life in an austere and brutal environnment.

Second, I found the idea of the Glass House, in 20th century architecture theory and practice, very attractive. To me it summed up the beauty and utopian character of modernism. On the one hand, it was an idea progressive and distopian at the same time : glass thought as a way to improve humanity’s living conditions, but also as a means to control it. On the other hand, all modern buildings nicknamed “glass houses”, were nearly always thought of as great architectural achievements, but impossible to live in.

The Glass House merges these two inspirations into a single photographic piece.

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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.

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Concrete Jungle

By All Works, anthropocene, photographic objects, conceptual photography

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.

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Daugavpils/Dvinsk/Dyneburg/Borisoglebsk

By All Works, photographic objects, conceptual photography, documentary

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.

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rettaM dna dniM

By All Works, photographic objects, conceptual photography, mirrors

The Tehran Museum for Contemporary Art provided a provocative context for Nicolas Grospierre’s work created for the kurz/dust exhibition, shown at the Warsaw Center for Contemporary Art. A late modernist structure designed by Kamran Diba, and inaugurated in 1977 on Queen Farah Pahlavi’s commission, the Tehran Museum stores an outstanding collection of Western modern art objects, Only a couple of these works are currently on view, while 99% of the artworks bought with the state fund out of National Iranian Oil Company which has benefited from high revenue from raised prices and heavily exploited oil production in the 1970s. are – as they say – “collecting dust” in the museum’s storage. They are carefully preserved and prevented from circulation by Revolutionary Guards’ commission, which forbids both entertaining and making profit out of indecent content. The museum operates by showing mainly Iranian artists, occasionally in the company of international artists.

Grospierre, with his interest in changing concepts of power as embodied in architectural projects, uses photography here in its factual modus operandi – as a mere reflection. The object photographed and turned into a black mirror again, is Noriyuki Haraguchi’s piece Matter and Mind. The minimalist installation, a rectangular pool filled with oil is located in one of the Museum’s underground atriums and keeps on reflecting the changes through the whole museum’s history. It references heavily both the contemporary radical gesture of plasticity and a traditional internal gathering space of a Persian garden. Oil: the result of the decomposition of organisms without the access of air (analogue to dust – the result of aridity in entropic processes) seems in this context like an undercurrent of a cultural history of international relations and cultural exchange.

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