Kordegarda Project

curator: Magda Kardasz
cooperation: Dominika Tomaszewska

Can an image explain or describe something? Probably not... It seems however that it is able to evoke emotions and intuitions, which would explain its hypnotising power.

Recurring inner tension and anxiety … Sometimes I succeed in turning them into images – which offers some relief.

K.Z.
Berlin, May 2010

The exhibition at the Kordegarda Project in Warsaw is another part of the series Briesen, pursued by Krzysztof Zieliński since 1995. ‘Briesen’ is the pre-1945 name of the artist’s home town of Wąbrzeźno. The whole series is a documentation of a personal experience of Berlin, the artist’s new domicile.       

The photographs, showing a modern city stripped of noise and chaos, take the viewer on a nostalgic journey through the daily life of a city locked up in timelessness. Searching for symbolic meanings in the architecture of Berlin, shown here in a low-key manner, resembling an ordinary provincial town rather than a powerful capital, Zieliński captures emptiness, stillness, silence, melancholy.           

The author balances between an objective documentation of the Berlin reality and a desire to comment on his own representations. The photographs are a narrational map of the author’s subjective experiences, a record of his quest for identity, an immigrant’s confrontation with an extant place. The works’ documentational aspect becomes less important in the face of the emotional intensity of images recording a seemingly insignificant space, unattractive for the consumerist world, and its daily life. The whole thing takes place against the background of rather simple decorations. What is striking here is the ordinariness of the images, the lack of even a single feature, demanding to be recorded, characteristic for the city’s universal image. The artist points the camera at dirty, shabby-looking walls, old shop windows, messy apartments, grey streets, at objects and places connected solely by the individual experience that deprives them of unambiguity. The city space is exploited by the artist as a place seemingly without properties, affiliations, which you create yourself for your own use.                         

The distorted sense of time emanating from these photographs, the sense of being suspended in a void, touches also upon the issue of identity self-definition. Existing in the city doesn’t require our real presence, only its traces are visible. Discarded everyday objects – old cars, antennas, traffic signs, signboards, inscriptions – become universal evidence of a temporary existence in the scenery of the city, fragments of which are appropriated by the artist’s imagination.
Dominika Tomaszewska

Krzysztof Zieliński – born in 1974 in Wąbrzeźno. Graduate (2001) of the Department of Photography, FAMU Film School, Prague, where he has been teaching since 2009. Lives and works in Wąbrzeźno and Berlin.    

Selected individual exhibitions:  

• 1999 Cathedral, Galerie Velryba, Prague
• 2000 Planespoting, Linhart Foundation, Prague
• 2002 Hometown, Galeria Zderzak, Cracow
• 2004 Hometown, Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw
• 2005 Hometown, Istitutto Polacco, Rome; Random Pleasures, Galeria Zderzak, Cracow
• 2008 Millennium School, Żak-Branicka Gallery [formerly Galerie Magazin], Berlin; Center of Contemporary Arts Znaki Czasu, Toruń
• 2009 Briesen, Starmach Gallery, Cracow
• 2010 Pałac, Galeria PF – CK Zamek, Poznań
• 2010 Wszystko w porządku?, Galeria Starter, Poznań       

Selected group exhibitions:  

• 1998 Sniženy rozpocet, Galerie Mánes, Prague
• 2002–2003 The View from Here, Ludwig Museum, Budapest; Mestska Galerie, Prague; Riffe Gallery, Columbus (USA); SPACES Gallery, Cleveland (USA)
• 2003 Biennale Fotografii 3, Galeria Arsenał, Poznań Prague Biennale 1, Veletržni Palace, Prague
• 2004 Nova Polska 70–80, Maison Folie de Moulins, Lille 26th São Paulo Bienal – invited artist, Pavilhao Ciccillo Matarazzo, São Paulo
• 2005 El Diablo no es tan feo como se pinta, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires
• 2006 The New Documentalists, Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw
• 2006 Ideal City – Invisible Cities, Zamość; Potsdam
• 2007 2. FotoFestival – Crossings, Mannheim
• 2009 Wir Berliner, Berlin
• 2010 Przeszłość jest obcym krajem, Center of Contemporary Arts Znaki Czasu, Toruń