Review
Regional Modernities Monika Sosnowska
ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary
Art) Sturt Street Southbank
Exhibition dates 10
August – 29 September 2013
Billed
by ACCA as: “The first major showing of
internationally acclaimed Polish artist Monika Sosnowska in the southern
hemisphere, following her recent site specific commission for Central Park, New
York”.[i]
The Centre presents four works by the artist, Façade, Wall, Corridor and Screen.
As can be imagined by their title these
works all relate to architecture, more specifically to the architecture of soviet-era
Warsaw, Sosnowska’s home and the subject of her art.
The
artist studied at the at the Academy of Fine Arts, Poznań, Poland between 1993
– 1998
and at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam between1999 – 2000[ii] and received significant international attention at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 with her work 1:1, an enormous steel structure bent and distorted seemingly to fit into the gallery interior. She has collaborated with architect Christian Kerez in 2007 and designed “The Promises of the Past” exhibition structure, an untitled work that Michal Wolinski refers to as “art-as-exhibition-design” for the Centre Pompidou in 2010[iii]. She has also been interviewed in architecture and design magazines such as ‘DOMUS’ for her views on soviet era architecture in her native Warsaw.[iv]
and at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam between1999 – 2000[ii] and received significant international attention at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 with her work 1:1, an enormous steel structure bent and distorted seemingly to fit into the gallery interior. She has collaborated with architect Christian Kerez in 2007 and designed “The Promises of the Past” exhibition structure, an untitled work that Michal Wolinski refers to as “art-as-exhibition-design” for the Centre Pompidou in 2010[iii]. She has also been interviewed in architecture and design magazines such as ‘DOMUS’ for her views on soviet era architecture in her native Warsaw.[iv]
The four works she presented at ACCA are
quite diverse from one another demonstrating her intent to conceptualise and
present an idea rather than a method of working or a particular attitude
towards materials, though this is certainly apparent through her use of
industrial workshops.
Entering Gallery 1 we are presented with Façade, a six meter high steel structure
hanging from the gallery ceiling, collapsed.
The impossibly thin elements of this ‘façade’ are recognizably a window
frame system with fixtures (such as window handles and stays) which have been
folded and distorted to resemble the form of a hanging piece of fabric. The work hangs there limply to be admired and
pondered at as if all life has left the structural integrity of the original rectilinear
façade.
Façade
The second work Wall is an in-situ concrete construction approximately two and a
half meters tall with very thick walls painted internally in that unmistakable
shade of institutional green. The dado
line is there too, reminding us of the emphasis on ‘practicality’ that the institution
demands of its builders and architects.
Wall
As
Robert Nelson (2013) points out “Looking like a substation plonked near a
railway, this concrete booth presents an interior that is just as confusing as
the outside. There's enough room to enter; but you wouldn't call it a room,
even if the painted dado makes a concession to the eye.”[v]
The
placement of this work invites us to proceed towards it in order to explore it,
but once inside the ribbed interior walls, which hint at a maze-like space,
don’t deliver any spatial experience, therefore one experiences it as if
looking at a screen rather than as a room.
Corridor
on the other hand is definitely a space but one that is too narrow to
enter. The impracticalities of a system
which is more preoccupied with its own bureaucratic rules rather than with the
comfort of its citizens comes to mind here.
The ultra-white light of the fluorescent lighting accentuates a sinister
or at least a totally mundane and utilitarian reality for which similar
corridors were built behind the iron curtain.
Corridor
Screen
in Gallery 3, on the other hand, sits rather demurely on a side wall a bit like
the hall stand inside a front door though in reality the work is as large as a
shop front. Sosnowska seems to play here
with distortion in scale and visual composition by concertinaing the steel
structure along an imaginary horizontal line.
My
impression of the exhibition is that the four works cause the visitor to
experience an oscillation between nostalgia and dystopia, nostalgic because of
their physical distortions and dystopic because of the hermetic nature of their
meaning. It as if the artist is writing
a kind of manifesto, a retrospective one, of an era where innocence and
brutality coexisted but which are now abstracted through her work in order to
be exorcised of meaning and power.
Screen
Handrail, from
the 2008 Venice Biennale, compared with Louise Bourgeois’ work The Blind Leading The Blind (1947 1949)
demontrates how power in Sosnowska’s work seems to leaked out, totally lacking
the visceral, instinctive impetus of Bourgeois’ piece.
Bourgeois,
L 1947-1949, The Blind Leading The Blind Sosnowska,
M 2008, Handrail
In
‘Artforum’ critic Michal Wolinski makes reference to Sosnowska’s minimalism
explaining how she reduces ‘each project to one idea and amplifying an element
that is crucial to the given space” (Wolinski 2010). So while Sosnowska’s architectural
connections are real and quite well documented her ability to bring about a
reaction to her works that could hit us with the same force as the actual soviet-era architecture that
inspires her is in little evidence.
During
Sosnowska’s artist’ talk on 13 August 2013, curator Charlotte Day’s assertion
that she “creates large, psychologically charged architectural installations”
seem to me untrue. If I have a criticism
of the work it is that she takes a powerful reality and turns it into a
‘decorative’ motif, because by adhering to the minimalist aesthetic, Wolinski
refers to, and stripping down the work to an elemental simplicity (however
distorted), Sosnowska leaves behind the ‘grayness of everything’ she discusses in
her interview with Fudala for DOMUS (2009).
The smell of bureaucracy is gone, the inconvenience and joylessness of
an architecture that was only built for its utilitarianism has disappeared and
only its ghost, Sosnowska’s work, is left.
The
many delightful additions and ingenious modifications she refers to in her
interview are not referenced at all. The
spirit of those citizens, who resisted ‘the system’, by adding humanity to
their environment and creating homes and places they could live in doesn’t
exist in the work, and that is a pity because she misses the opportunity to
make the work affect us in a visceral and instinctive way.
Eli
Giannini
[i]Monika
Sosnowska: Regional Modernities. ACCA
website, viewed 14 September 2013, https://www.accaonline.org.au/exhibition/monika-sosnowska-regional-modernities
[ii]Monika
Sosnowska, Press. Hauser and Wirth
website, viewed 14 September 2013, http://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/48/monika-sosnowska/biography/
[iii]
Woliński, M 2010, ‘Monika Sosnowska’,
Artforum, May, New York NY, p.224
[iv]Fudala, T 2009, ‘Interview with Monika Sosnowska, Concrete
Heritage’, Domus, Rozzano, Italy no.
926 view 14 September 2014. http://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/48/monika-sosnowska/press/
[v]
Nelson,
R 2013, ‘Monuments to the failure of modernist architecture’, The Age, September 4, p 13
No comments:
Post a Comment