Krzysztof Pijarski Knihy

"'Zofia Rydet. Record, 1978-1990' offers the presentation of Zofia Rydet's monumental photographic project Sociological Record. The artist began the development of the cycle in 1978 and continued almost until her death in 1997. Rydet began working on the cycle at an advanced age (when she was sixty-seven years old) as an established artist with a considerable exhibition portfolio. 'Sociological Record' abounds in contradictions -- rather than a cycle of research or inventory photography, it is a total project that sits within the tradition of intuitive artistic atlases and catalogues. Always on the road and with a camera in her hand, Rydet never made prints from most of the negatives that 'Sociological Record' comprises. As a result, only a modest portion of her work is known today, while some photographs have been repeated many times at different shows, and in different formats. 'Zofia Rydet. Record, 1978-1990' at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw in 2015 attempted to reconstruct an exhibition that never came into being: on the one hand, it relief [that is, relies] on guide-lines from Rydet's notes and private written correspondence, while on the other hand, it added a contemporary dimension to her work through the use of currently available technologies (especially in the case of prints that have never been produced before)."--

Based on his home city, Warsaw, the Polish photographer Krszysztof Pijarski examines the phenomenon of the destruction of monuments in Poland at the time of the political transition. He creates montages using his own shots of Warsaw’s plazas and photos he has taken of archive photographs. The montages visualize different layers of time and make what has past visible by the fact that it is now absent. Hence the artist creates an archive of the places where the aesthetic of disappearence has been inscribed in the physical and symbolic web of the city. The simultaneous existence of the different layers of time thus becomes an indispensable design element, which gives visibilty to things that have become invisible. The photographic reconstruction of memory ensures that these memories are preserved. The complexity of our perception of reality, as it is dealt with in the work of Sophie Calle, is hence deepened on a purely photographic level and constantly highlights the role of the medium, which is immanent in the preservation, creation and construction of memory, as well as the significance and use of photographic archives. 00Exhibition: C/O Berlin, Germany (22.08. - 08.11.2015)