The photographer from Wrocław has attracted increasing attention. In 2015 he was awarded the Warto Prize and two years later he received the Griffin Art Space Prize. In 2016, he was invited to the European Eyes on Japan residency programme, as part of which he travelled to Japan. As he later admitted in an interview with the website Dolnośląskość.pl:
I didn’t understand some situations, not even particularly complicated courtly etiquette, just how to order udon in a local bar. The dominant emotion was alienation. I was also learning a new lens – it’s all interconnected and tangled; the senses you’re trying to capture and the everyday banal situations associated with the equipment you’re working with. I didn’t pretend to myself that I could make sense of it all, rather I drew strength from being excluded and how my brain and body were straining to grasp it all. I took a lot of photos, which I didn’t return to until a year later, preparing an album.
The result of the trip was a photo book, Subterranean River, featuring fragments of nature, still lifes and portraits, which won the author the Krzysiek Makowski Award in the Photographic Publication of the Year 2019 competition. The jury appreciated the work for its uncompromising approach, and its meticulousness and perfection to the smallest detail, adding that the formal diversity adopted by the creator of the work combines into an interesting mosaic, which, to use a colloquialism, can most simply be summarised as: ‘classic but off-the-rails’.
In 2024, on the basis of the Wrocław photographic gallery Miejsce przy Miejscu 14, the publishing house Sun Archive Books (Archiwum Słońca) was established, which Rusznica runs as curator, editor and producer. He also uses his combined expertise in other venues. The exhibition Oczy Moje Zwodzą Pszczoły (My Eyes Are Deceived by the Bees), curated by the artist together with Kamila Bondar, ran from March until the end of August 2025. It was the first cross-sectional exhibition of Polish photography at Warsaw’s Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Arts in many years, including works by 46 female artists. On the Vogue magazine website, Rusznica explained: ‘We do not intend to identify a new canon. We are interested in an overview. We live in an age of such excess and abundance of photographic images that nothing else would make sense.’
