Other photographs, rid of any human presence whatsoever, become more abstract: when looking at an empty house space or a natural landscape, we can only try guessing where the main protagonist might have initially been. In a photographic studio, only a red curtain remained, while in a courtyard all we can see is an empty carpet-hanger. The viewer is drawn into a weird and uncanny game of looking for the traces of the presence of a girl or a woman. One begins to wonder what she looked like, as well as reflect: would the presented scenes take place at all without her participation? In Album, Grzeszykowska works around the mechanisms of memory and forgetting, the reliability of memories and one's personal history.
Work that acts as a certain counterpoint and a complement to Album, is the series Portraits (2006), digitally generated photographs of nonexistent persons.
Aneta Grzeszykowska, Album, 2005
201 photographs in an album 29 x 40 x 9 cm (unique copy).
The artwork is part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.
Author: Ewa Gorządek, March 2015, transl. Ania Micinska, April 2015