Visions of the future by seven young European photographers from the PARALLEL Platform 1st cycle.
Visions of the future by seven young European photographers from the PARALLEL Platform 1st cycle.
The Future is ours. This is a phrase which has ambivalent meanings for the emerging photographers from all over Europe who take part in this exhibition initiated by Parallel European Photography Platform at Landskrona Photo Festival.
On the one hand, the seven participating artists still remember the feelings from the 2000s when this sentence sounded so enthusiastic and emancipating to them, members of the Generation Next who were born between the 80s and the mid-90s. On the other hand, by now, in the era of the seahorse holding onto a Q-tip and the turtle deformed by a six-pack ring, its connotations became more and more depressing and gloomy. The phrase continually reminds them of their responsibilities as visual artists of capturing visions of our seemingly post-apocalyptic future.
What is the role of contemporary artists and knowledge producers in an era of crisis? Artists can combine the creative and emotionally moving power of the arts with the planning strategies of activism to bring about social change. Alternatively, they can make the viewer contemplate the possible solutions to the crisis by reminding them of the impermanence of life and inevitable death. These reminders do not activate directly and lack any form of didactics; instead, they offer a sensual influence that affects the viewer.
Contemporary vanitas snapshots; photo series based on the analysis of archival materials belonging to a historical museum; meticulously composed and captured uncanny visions of post-human body parts; seascape photo-films and conceptual photo installations based on ornamental wallpapers as photographic research projects of natural phenomena – the works on show are dynamic ‘visions-in-the-future’ grounded in a present that still has a chance, maybe the last, to alter its future to come.
Emese Mucsi
SEVEN PERSONAL INTERVIEWS WITH THE ARTISTS were published in the exhibition catalogue and displayed on site as part of the show, adding broader context to the artworks. In these conversations the photographers gave an insight to their studios, the intimate surroundings where their works were produced – they tell about their educational background, inspirations, artistic practices, experiments, readings, statements, and elaborate on their future visions.
Emese Mucsi: In The Future is Ours exhibition you present images from two chapters of your ongoing series entitled Histories. What inspired you to start working on this project?
Antonina Gugała: Everything started when I travelled to Greece in January 2017. I was visiting a friend who was living and working in Athens at the time. We spent
a week walking around the city and talking to people about what was going on in Greece with regards to politics, the immigration crisis, and social problems.
We also attended a few events connected to these subjects organized by Documenta festival. I was under
the impression that the Greek people I met, of pretty much the same age as me, were much more radical in their political views than my friends back in Warsaw.
It seemed that coming of age in the times of crisis had made them more conscious of their rights and responsibilities, but also angrier and disappointed with reality. It was a moment between Brexit, Donald Trump winning the US elections, and Marine le Pen running for president in France. It felt that some things were about to change and that these changes would not have been possible hadn’t there been an economical crisis before. By the end of my stay, I knew that I wanted to learn more about what was happening in Greece and why, and how this was connected to the events taking place in other parts of Europe, especially in Poland.
What was your method of investigation as a visual artist?
My first reaction was to go back to Athens and start exploring the place on my own. I would simply walk around the city and observe the streets while reading different texts to help me understand what I was seeing.
I was mainly took pictures of everyday objects that I found on the streets. After Athens I travelled to Thessaloniki and then to the countryside in the Epirus region, all within a few months’ time. As I was going back and forth between Greece and Poland, the political situation back at home started to change dynamically, with a right-wing government introducing new laws and people taking to the streets to express their dissatisfaction with the state of affairs. I felt and I continue to feel anxious about the future of Europe. These feelings of anger and hopelessness that I was observing on the streets of Athens seemed almost like a warning sign for what is to come. My observations led me to start comparing Greek and Polish modern history. I got engrossed in how the events that took place in both countries from 1945 to date had shaped
the present crisis.
The images of the first chapter of Histories are quite pale. Is it intentional? What was your purpose?
All of the images in the project so far have been shot
on film. I did not have to manipulate them to achieve this pale effect. The climate conditions in Greece are quite harsh. Everything that stays on the streets for more than a few days quickly loses its colour. Things become pale, almost bleak and covered with dust. Visually this is a very attractive aspect of the urban landscape there.
It is desaturated and stagnant. While I was making these images I often felt overwhelmed by the climate. The air was arid and seemed unable to move. The overpowering presence of the sun would further enhance this feeling.
Did you see the crisis a small-scale example of a larger crisis or a world crisis? In my view what was happening in Greece, this kind of crisis, this intensely chaotic state of being could be a model for future situations which could happen in any other parts of the world. What do you think about that?
In psychology, there is this theory saying that crises occur naturally throughout your life. The important part is that you have to actively work to overcome them. Once you succeed, you move on to the next stage of your development and shortly afterwards, the next crisis kicks in. Drawing from this concept, I used to consider the term “crisis” connected to a rather short period of time, the climax of a process, which calls for an immediate reaction. Being stuck in this situation for almost a decade, not seeing any dynamic change happening is a very depressing situation. This is something that Francis Fukuyama refers to. He says that the problem right now is that negative political events do not trigger a strong enough or radical enough social response for things to change.
What is your vision of the future? How can you imagine yourself 10 years later?
I have a lot of anxiety when I think about what the future might bring. I try to be as aware as possible of what is happening around me and not to ignore the signals coming in from neighbouring countries that some things might change soon. This is the reason why in this particular project I turned for answers to history.
I hope that I can learn something from it that can help me prepare for the future.
As an artist do you feel responsible for showing works, e.g. in exhibition situations, which could be mind-changing and could somehow lead people to form their future?
I am aware that artists are not always successful at doing these things, but I still feel some responsibility for at least trying to inspire critical thinking. In my work, I mainly concentrate on small everyday gestures, such as different behavior patterns that people have which might seem natural, but once you start analyzing them, you see that they come from a certain tradition of thought and that they might not be very up to date anymore. That is why, for example in this particular project, I wanted to show that even though objects are kept at public museums for the purpose of viewers interacting with them, our contact with these objects is limited. There are many rules that you need to follow in a museum: you cannot touch the objects, sometimes you cannot photograph them, at other times you are expected to dress “appropriately” when entering an exhibition. There are many barriers between the viewer and the object. What interests me is how these barriers are established and what is their deeper meaning. I think that it is important to understand that the way a museum operates is not politically neutral and that it is part of a larger scheme. In my work I like concentrating on these small mechanisms and pulling the curtain up a little bit showing what is behind it. At the same time, as a viewer, I hate moralizing work, so this is why I try not to be too serious or direct about what I am trying to say.
I find the image of the plastic chair you are exhibiting very symbolic and strong. The plastic chair has several connotations. In the context you have shown, it seems like a skeleton object while plastic as material has also a meaning being cheap and in an economic crisis many of these chairs are used for the reconstruction.Of course plastic in the context of Anthropocene has bad connotations since when a plastic object breaks it becomes non degradable waste. I see it as a very symbolic image and you also selected it to represent
the first chapter of the series. What was your purpose
of showing this piece?
In the series there is this image of the chair and an image of a mockup of the Erechtheion from the Acropolis Museum in Athens. When I put these two images together, I was thinking about which one of these shapes is more recognizable for people right now. The plastic chair is something that is so common that everyone knows what it feels like to sit on it. You see it everywhere you go.
The Erechtheion, on the other hand is a building that played an important role in Western culture for a long time and has been reproduced innumerable times. It is considered an iconic figure, something that everyone in the Western world can connect to. Having this in mind, I put these two images together because I wanted to question their value. I was deliberating which one of them was going to prevail or which one was a more universal symbol nowadays. I was also amused to realize how similar these objects were in terms of formal aspects.
First of all they are both white, plus the back of the chair recalls the colonnade of the Erechtheion. Thanks to photography I was also able to play around with the scale of these two objects. I also noticed that while the mockup of the Erechtheion is so fragile that they had to put it in a glass cabinet, the chair is a very efficient object and can survive a lot. So my main question here is which of these two objects proves more permanent culturally or naturally. Which one is going to stick for longer?
The Erechtheion mockup links the first and the second chapter of your project. So let’s talk about the new part, how it is connected to the previous one and how you chose the objects.
I conducted some research on the history of Greece and I found inspiration in that. I chose to focus on Ancient Greek heritage and its presence in the National Museum in Warsaw. With news headlines about debt and austerity measures, it felt like a good moment to discuss questions of cultural appropriation. I also wanted to touch upon a more universal theme, so that more people could connect to the work and understand that what is happening in Greece right now is part of a bigger process.
The idea behind the second chapter of Histories was to use photography to document the complex path of the Ancient Greek objects from their place of discovery to the collection of the National Museum in Warsaw. I wanted to signal that these artefacts had been part of other collections before arriving at their current destination, in order to start a discussion on the subject of cultural appropriation within Western museums. The path of these objects from their place of discovery to the museum was often complicated and controversial. Some of the objects were found by Polish archeologists, some originate from private collections nationalised after the Second World War, others were war revindications. The stories behind these objects summarize the 20th century European history. The chapter’s intention is to talk about these stories as well as to show how museum collections are built and displayed. I am interested in how these objects are exhibited, photographed, and preserved. All of these observations can contribute to a deeper understanding of how museums operate. I believe that if you investigate an object carefully enough you can really get to know something about its owner, as well as its past.
You were collaborating with the workers of the museum. You also showed them holding the objects in their hands.
Actually, I did not have a choice. I was told that I was allowed to touch none of the objects and a museum worker would have to be present at all times during the shoot. From the beginning I knew that I wanted to show through the photographs that these objects had once belonged to other collections. I chose to photograph them in the hands of the museum workers because in this way I could display the profuse labels with their past and current inventory numbers giving a hint to the viewer about the value and the hierarchical status of these objects. I did not really direct them as to which way they were supposed to hold the artefacts and I don’t think that they were aware of how much of their bodies would be in the pictures, so I think that the workers’ presence on the set is probably the most documentary element in the images.
And how did you pick up these objects? Was it important to show something specific, e.g. that object like an idol?
I made a selection of objects that had been categorized as Ancient Greek in the museum’s inventory. My list had to be accepted by the Head Curator of the department and after that I got access to the inventory cards, which contained the histories that I share in the footnotes of the images. That was when I found out where they had been discovered, who had previously owned them and all of the other pieces of information that I needed to know. I based my final selection on this. I wanted to have a representative range of different stories, so I focused
on this more than on the formal qualities of the objects.
You also display an appropriated document among the images of the two chapters.
In Landskrona, I will be showing The 10 commandments of prehistoric archaeology, a text published in 1907 by Erazm Majewski, a self-taught antiquarian and archeologist who was very much involved in creating the Polish school of archaeology. When I first stumbled upon it, I got fascinated by discovering such a clear image of the author’s perspective on archaeology and his motivation behind working with ancient heritage.
I think that his views are representative of the turn of the century way of thinking about archaeology and science in general. He speaks from the perspective of a scholar and a religious man. When you read the text, you can feel his strong sense of entitlement which was probably also connected to his material and social status. I think that Erazm Majewski is an interesting figure, because on one hand he did a lot of good for archaeology, like creating the first prehistoric museum in Poland and preserving many ancient objects that might have been destroyed otherwise, but at the same time he took these objects out of their original context and brought them to Warsaw, so his actions are rather ambiguous. Some of the artefacts that I photographed at the National Museum in Warsaw were previously owned by Erazm Majewski.
How this project and your former works are connected? I am also curious about how your studies was as a photographer and how your approach was formed by the training, or by anything else. Which was the first moment when you defined yourself as a photographer or when you got the idea to work with this medium?
Before I started making photographs, I attended university programmes in lberian Studies and Psychology. I quickly realized that academic research is too constrained for me. I discovered that there were issues difficult to describe with statistics, words, and theories and I felt that using tools from different disciplines could be more effective in expressing certain thoughts. That was when I started exploring photography as a potential language to use in my research. So when I am working on my projects, I am always reading and researching a lot in a quasi-academic way, but I am very happy to have the freedom that art provides me to express the results
in a non-textual way.
Where did you study photography?
First off, I took a gap year at university and enrolled for a year programme in Photography at a private school in Warsaw called Akademia Fotografii. After that I started attending different workshops at an NGO called Association for Creative Initiatives “ę”. They used to run many programmes dedicated to emerging photographers, so I participated in three projects there that shaped my way of thinking about making art. And finally in 2015, I started studying Photography (BA) at the Institute for Creative Photography in Opava in the Czech Republic.
Do you have any artists whom you follow or who inspire you?
Yes, of course. There are many artists whose work I admire. One example is Aneta Grzeszykowska, a Polish contemporary artist working mainly with photography and sculpture. I like her work because it is both very attractive visually and smart. Zbigniew Libera is a very charismatic figure as well. I am also attracted to sculptures, I even used to work at a sculpture museum for a while. Among the artists working with this medium
I admire the oeuvre of Mona Hatoum and Anish Kapoor.
You told me that you read a lot. Are there books that inspired you?
Last year I read the book entitled Podróżnicy bez mapy
i paszportu (eng. “travellers without a map or passport”). It is a book about Michel Leiris and the history of the relationship of ethnography and art in the 1930s. The book was written by Tomasz Szerszeń, who is both an artist and a scholar. This book has stuck with me for some time now and even though I didn’t read it for the purpose of this project, I still draw inspiration from it.
I also recently read The Predicament of Culture by James Clifford, another book on ethnography and art. I always wanted to be an anthropologist, so I guess that is why I am drawn to these texts.