Photo

Maurycy Gomulicki, 1996

Harry Gruyaert, 2003

Stas Bartnikas’s favourite place to fly to and photograph is Iceland. He believes that Iceland is one of the most photogenic countries when looked from above – the combination of ice, snow, volcanic formations, glacial rivers, beaches and ocean makes for an absolutely surreal sight.

The project “Garden” by Marta Zgierska and Mateusz Sarełło is an invitation to observe a couple in a dialogue, negotiating their relationship and their collaborative authorship. The boundaries between the two are ambiguous; obsessive, poetic and analytical. Zgierska is dedicated to systematic fragmentation and dissection of the image of her own body, but at the same time also the dissection of flowers as symbols of other women. This results in persistent acts of contradictory self-inscriptions, at the same time violent and subtle.

Some photos from a well-known series by an even more well-known Polish photographer, Wojciech Plewiński.

The works from the “Brushing Grass” series document simple performative actions among clusters of grass. Brushed with a comb or smoothed out with the artists’ bare hands, the plants look like humanoid heads, adorned with thick mops of hair. And yet they resist; unruly ‘hair’ sticks out, grasses break when touched.

The depiction of female anger as irrational, hysterical, and just plain ugly has a long tradition: from harpies, witches and Medusa, to young girls inculcated to be polite and smiling, to memes of raging feminists and the so-called Resting Bitch Face syndrome.

The concept of identity, like that of reality itself, has become amorphous and multiplicitous. The result is a fluxing world in which fixity has been replaced by the potential for a range of shifting forms. In an individualistic culture, we can assemble and deconstruct ourselves at will, with the strict bonds of old giving way to a liquid instability.

Somewhere in Eastern Europe, children gather every summer to wear military uniforms, camp in tents under harsh conditions and practice firing guns. For an outsider, the idea itself seems scary. For them, it’s the time of their life.

Hugh Holland’s 1970s photographs of kids and teens skateboarding in empty swimming pools and boardwalks in Southern California are a perfect snapshot of the wild, frenetic energy of that era.

Herbert List, 1933

“Waiting for the Snow” (“Czekając na śnieg”) is a photographic project presenting the curious phenomenon of Polish migration to South American countries during the 19th-century partitions and the interwar period.

The “Magnetic Sculptures” project by Honza Zamojski is a series of overscaled black-and-white photographs depicting sculptures made of tiny magnets. Recalling the tone and proportion of Brassaï’s famous portfolio “Les Sculptures de Picasso”, Zamojski’s shadowy monuments also invoke the unrealized forms of constructivist architecture.

The “INSIDE INSECT” project is a personal exploration of the work, construction and representation of the symbolic universe of the film-maker Luis Buñuel. “INSIDE INSECT” updates the figure of Luis Buñuel through contemporary artistic perspectives, and explores the use and function of images.

Swiss photographer and artist Marcel Rickli reflects on pressing concerns about radioactive waste in the form of a visual research project in the field of tension between documentary photography and art. His latest work, AEON, contrasts the symbolic nature of nuclear semiotics with the factuality of repositories as they are planned and built today.

This series by New York artist Shelli Weiler presents forms of escapist amusement as hostile and uninhabitable environments. Subjects and spaces are produced in the pursuit of ideals, where sites for entertainment are fashioned by their shortcomings. Through the negation of colour, this series focuses on how the construction of fantasy inevitably entails its own failure.

American philosopher and literary critic Frederic Jameson once said that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The photographer Kata Geibl refers to this thesis with her photo series entitled “There is Nothing New Under The Sun”.

Arno Rafael Minkkinen, Halfway Up Mt. Mitchell, Burnsville, NC, 2013