Drowning Rooms
Anna Orlikovska’s Ambiguous Situations
She
was nominated last year for Deutsche Bank’s Prize
for Young Polish Art; her installation "Being" in the Zacheta
Gallery in Warsaw created a stir. The jury found Anna Orlikovska’s
work convincing and awarded her the second prize in the competition – an
artists’ grant in Berlin. Jutta von Zitzewitz and Achim
Drucks visited the artist in her temporary studio.
Anna
Orlikowska in her Berlin studio
Photo:
Achim Drucks
In Berlin’s problematic
district of Wedding, the garden city Atlantic
comes across as a cultivated oasis. This is thanks to the fact that the
owners of the freshly renovated housing projects from the 1920s are
concerned with more than just collecting rent – the settlement also serves
the cause of intercultural understanding and the support of the arts. Georg
Uecker has his studio here, while Anna
Orlikovska lives and works just a few doors down. For six months, a
renovated storefront apartment will serve her as a temporary studio: an
unusual situation for the young grantee. "When I open the curtains, I feel
like I’m in an aquarium" – a challenge that inspired her to her
installation. At the close of her Berlin sojourn, she will be transforming
the street-level flat into an art space – with an installation that
passers-by can view through the large storefront window.
|
The artist in the storfront windows
of her studio
Photo: Achim
Drucks
|
For the moment, however, the studio seems almost unused;
only an empty table, a bicycle, and a shopping cart filled with odds and
ends are standing around. A large mirror is leaning against the wall. The
shy 27 year-old invites us for a talk in a clean, Ikea-style kitchen. Anna
Orlikovska tells us that she is in the middle of realizing a new
photographic project in which she tracks down hidden locations in
nighttime Berlin, using the flash to make them visible. "The simple fact
of using artificial instead of natural light completely changes the
character of the images. That fascinates me." In the process, she
addresses a theme she has been involved with since her art studies at the academy
in Lodz – rendering the invisible visible, recording the presence of a
world beyond physical reality. In her photographic works, the artist is
not interested in documenting anything. For her, the camera and the medium
of photography are merely tools she uses to realize her conceptual ideas.
While the early works of Cindy
Sherman made a strong impact on her, today she raves far more about Thomas
Demand’s laconic images. She stresses that she does not
primarily see herself as a photographer.
|
"Danse Macabre", 2005,
Courtesy
Anna Orlikowska
This
is also reflected in her work Danse Macabre. The triptych confronts
the viewer with a dense mess of colors and forms, an allover of colorful
clothing spilling out of orange plastic containers, hanging on long poles
extending to the ceiling of the high space, and piled up on tables – an
improvised second-hand store in a former factory space. On the fringe of
the picture is a mysterious figure that turns out to be the artist
herself, her face hidden behind a plastic cow mask. This figure also
appears on the other two pictures of the monumental triptych, an alien
being from another world in a seemingly realistic everyday scenario. "The
images depict locations from my own personal world in Lodz. My parents’
apartment with my ailing grandmother, or my father’s workshop. The masked
figure brings a symbolic component into the picture." Yet she was less
concerned in quoting the bulls of Max
Ernst or Pablo
Picasso than in establishing references to the gods of Ancient Egypt.
The Ankh symbol that she
wears in the form of a tiny tattoo on her right arm is also borrowed from
Egyptian mythology; it symbolizes eternal life.
"Danse
Macabre" (detail), 2005,
Courtesy
Anna Orlikowska
There is also a very personal
connection to the textile factory at the heart of the Agoraphobia
triptych. Anna Orlikovska worked here for a time after finishing her
studies. She says that the mess of the run-down factory halls was a shock
to her after her years of refuge at the art academy, and it threatened to
overwhelm her. "I was used to these clean, well-ordered spaces, and then I
suddenly found myself in a total mess." In contrast to Danse
Macabre, she evokes the presence of another reality not through
mythological additions, but through formal components alone.
"Agoraphobia",
2006,
Courtesy Anna Orlikowska
[1]
[2]
|
