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Here Grows an Unusual Cluster of Highly Deformed Pines, Known As Krzywy Las [Crooked Forest]

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Here Grows an Unusual Cluster of Highly Deformed Pines, Known As Krzywy Las [Crooked Forest] Witek Orski I would prefer not to talk about this One of the first pieces I intended to make for this carried with it. For one reason or another, I decided not to specific shade I was looking for, I perused a sampler at Exhibition view, 2019 exhibition was a very large photograph of a field of make the piece, but I still wanted to use the phrase in the a shopping centre. One particularly bold hue stood out, rapeseed spreading across the horizon. The inspiration exhibition title until I realised that the name of this yellow alarmingly yellow with a certain rotten quality about it. came from an old wives’ tale that admonished children flower in English is rape, conjuring up the phrase, ‘Don’t Numbered 1021 on the RAL colour chart, it turned out not to look at a flowering field of rape (rzepak) in the look at rape in the sunshine’. I couldn’t very well use that that this particular shade of yellow was generally referred sun. They say that a person can be blinded by looking as the title of my upcoming exhibition. After some time, to as RAPE YELLOW. Don’t look at rape in the sunshine. at bright yellow rapeseed in the stark glare of the sun. I the only element that remained of my initial concept was enjoyed the suggestion of visual violence that this phrase colour. The colour yellow, the colour of bile. To select the I would prefer not to talk about this Exhibition view, 2019 I would prefer not to talk about this Hebel-do-zdzierania-drzazg-i-wiórów, 2018, photograph (archival pigment print), 150 x 100 cm I would prefer not to talk about this, 2019, photograph (lenticular print), vinyl sticker, 60 x 100 cm I would prefer not to talk about this Sous les pavés, 2019, carrara marble, 20 x 16,5 x 6 cm I would prefer not to talk about this Untitled (paint), 2019, photograph (archival pigment print) 150 x 50 cm I would prefer not to talk about this How much does it weigh, 2018, photograph, (archival pigment print), 40 x 50 cm I would prefer not to talk about this Untitled (skin), 2019, photograph (digital print) on synthetic leather, steel I would prefer not to talk about this Untitled (foil), 2019, photograph, lightbox, PCV window frame I would prefer not to talk about this Postproduction, 2018, photograph, lenticular print, 120 x 120 cm Meadow Meadow rescues Rosa Luxemburg’s herbarium from oblivion, which is stored at the Central Archives of Modern Records in Warsaw. The archive comprises seventeen (After Rosa Lusxemburg’s Herbarium) identical school notebooks containing an amateur herbarium, and one additional notebook devoted to the classification of plants and minerals. Each page of the ink-pigment print on archival paper herbarium, created between 1913 and 1918 – mainly during the activist’s frequent incarcerations in Wrocław, the Wronki Fortress and Berlin, among other locations – 2018 features a plant specimen or its part alongside a German or Latin name, place of origin and the date it was collected or received. Legend has it that the herbarium, with margins containing notes with no direct relation to botanic descriptions, could also function as an alternative record in cipher of Luxemburg’s political philosophy. Bringing her herbarium closer to viewers, Orski concentrates on highlighting its formal characteristics: plant and paper textures, handwritten notes and drawings with which Luxemburg supplemented missing parts of plants. The artist also seeks to decipher the political dimension of the activist’s herbarium. GALAXY - A Studium of Polish Postmodernism, photographic installation, aprox. 150x100 cm., 2018, exhibition view: Gdańska Galeria Miejska A collection of ceramic cups with details of polish postmodern architecture from the late 90s and early 00s, presented on a backdrop image of highly polluted winter sky over Warsaw. / exhibition view: Gdańska Galeria Miejska GALAXY - A Studium of Polish Postmodernism, photographic installation, aprox. 150x100 cm., 2018, exhibition view: Gdańska Galeria Miejska How to Eat Meringue, photograph 100x125 cm., 2018 A photographic interpretation of a television event from the early 2000’s when the first lady (wife of a popular social-democratic president) thought polish people on savoir-vivre of eating a meringue cake. How to Eat Meringue, exhibition view: Gdańska Galeria Miejska No More Tears, photograph 100x125 cm., 2018, exhibition view: BWA Warszawa No More Tears, photograph 100x125 cm., 2018 exhibition view: BWA Warszawa Untitled (Touch Screen), photograph 100x66 cm., 2017 Untitled (Touch Screen), photograph 100x66 cm., 2017 exhibition view: BWA Warszawa Sad River in Which the Moon Swims, lenticular photographic print, 100x125 cm., 2017 The title of this piece was taken from a song by Krystyna Krahelska, who – in 1937 – posed for the most widely known monument of the Mermaid of Warsaw (sculpted by Ludwika Nitschowa). Krahelska was a scout, poet and songwriter. She was a nurse during the Warsaw Uprising and died on its second day. In the piece “The Moon Swims on a Sad River”, the image of Krystyna Krahelska has been made unreal by an artistic transformation. The artist combines post-photographic work (using graphic software) with key techniques of one of the most prominent Surrealists, René Magritte. These two aesthetics appear to be surprisingly similar. The end result is an atmospheric scene depicting a woman and a river, which exposes the processes behind the creation of photographic images. Sad River in Which the Moon Swims, lenticular photographic print, 100x125 cm., 2017 exhibition view: Museum of Modern Art (Warsaw) Rejuvenation, photographic The classic Polish landscape photographer, (Ziemie Odzyskane), together with a vast sea exceptional Polish features. An adequate on the other hand, it is a gloomy reflection installation 6 x 6 x 6 m., 2017, Jan Bułhak, was a tireless promoter of the border in the north and wide mountain ranges epilogue to such a farce is the fact that, once upon what was done to the Polish landscape exhibition view Center for genre in its patriotic, even nationalist, version. in the south. In a 1938 book manifesto, entitled Native Photography was reissued in 1950, after the democratic transformation. It was Contemporary Art (Warsaw) Due to the fact that he made his works Fotografia Ojczysta (Native Photography), Bułhak replaced all nationalist and romantically subjected to modular unification (by means of during a particularly tumultuous period, he he revealed the creative philosophy of his spirited images of meadows, villages and i.e. prefabricated materials such as setts), spatial used landscape photography as a purely photography, the glory of the homeland and cemeteries of Vilnius with photographic tributes segregation by fences, noise barriers, guard political tool. His images of “homeland views” in service to the nation. He also described the to the industrial achievements of communist rails, landscape and architecture being turned constituted a significant patriotic voice in the methods and techniques that constituted the Poland and the deeds of the Red Army. He into potential advertising spots for billboards. debate on Polish borders undergoing changes ethos of a native photographer. One of the most quietly replaced “the nation” with “the working Poland, rebuilt under a sky of clouds and at that time. Bułhak’s Poland included both absurd tips was the suggestion that clouds over people” in the text. Rejuvenation is an act of according to the raging capitalist logic, does the Eastern Borderlands (Kresy Wschodnie) Poland should be photographed in such way, ironic criticism of photography (and other forms deserve to be pictured as thus. and the so-called western Regained Lands as to give them full justice to their supposedly of art) as art that is made for the nation’s glory; Rejuvenation, photographic installation 6 x 6 x 6 m., 2017, exhibition view Center for Contemporary Art (Warsaw) Rejuvenation, photographic installation 6 x 6 x 6 m., 2017, exhibition view Center for Contemporary Art (Warsaw) Rejuvenation, photographic installation 6 x 6 x 6 m., 2017, exhibition view Center for Contemporary Art (Warsaw) Sommerliebe, photograph 150x100 cm., 2016 detail Sommerliebe, photograph 150x100 cm., 2016 exhibition view: BWA Warszawa Mirror Sideways, photograph, 100 x 66 cm., 2016 exhibition view: ARSENAL Gallery (Białystok) Mirror Sideways, photograph, 100 x 66 cm., 2016 The Fold, photographic installation, 2016 In the vicinity of Gryfino – a Polish town located in western Pomerania – there grows an unusual cluster of highly deformed pines, known as Krzywy Las [Crooked Forest]. The bent trees are estimated to date back to the first half of the 1930s. According to the most probable hypothesis, they were grown in this way on purpose by notching young trunks in a highly precise manner. Wood obtained from such disfigured trees was supposed to be provided to local German carpenters as material for furniture because it offered perfect parameters for achieving stunning shapes, bent in a way typical for late Art Deco. This goal would be best served by ca ten-year-old trees – older ones tended to be too large. However, the plan was thwarted by the outbreak of the Second World War. After peace was restored, the forest kept growing, now on the territory of Poland, forming a bizarre reminder of modernist dreams and projects. The word “display” – which can refer to both what is exhibited and presented on screen – is etymologically related to the Latin “dis-plicare,” literally meaning “to unfold” or “to spread out.” In The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque, Gilles Deleuze demonstrates that the fundamental unit of being – i.e. the fold – and the fundamental feature of being – i.e. folding – are not contrary to the gesture of unfolding: “Unfolding is thus not the contrary of folding, but follows the fold up to the following fold.
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