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Podsumowanie
Part of the A-Z project by Andrzej Tobis is being presented at the PHotoEspaña Festival in Madrid. The artist has spent a decade illustrating anew entries from Bildwörterbuch Deutsch und Polnisch, an illustrated German-Polish dictionary published in 1954 in the German Democratic Republic.
Content
Part of the A-Z project by Andrzej Tobis is being presented at the PHotoEspaña Festival in Madrid. The artist has spent a decade illustrating anew entries from Bildwörterbuch Deutsch und Polnisch, an illustrated German-Polish dictionary published in 1954 in the German Democratic Republic.
The dictionary is a bulky volume comprising over 10,000 entries with illustrations. The list of words includes fairly straightforward terms, such as ziemniak (potato) or pingwin (penguin), but also such ambiguous items as skrzynia z piaskiem (sand box) or ślizgawka spadzista (sloping slide).
In November 2006, nearly fifty years after the first edition of the dictionary, Andrzej Tobis began to collect and meticulously catalogue new images for the old entries. He explained:
The photographs illustrating the entries from the original dictionary have to be taken exclusively in Poland. The situations and objects in the photographs are neither pre-arranged nor digitally edited; they need to be found. Each entry in German and Polish has its own index number taken from the original dictionary. The photo and the entry, which is placed below it on a white bar, constitute an integral whole.
Embeded gallery style
display gallery as slider
The artist’s exhibition at the PHotoEspaña Festival is different from all his former presentations. The works are not arranged in alphabetical order but grouped according to more or less subjective and overlapping criteria. Andrzej Tobis says that the A-Z project expresses his doubts concerning the question of whether language can be a useful tool for defining reality.
Born in 1970, Andrzej Tobis is a painter and photographer. In 1995, he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice, where he currently teaches painting.
Andrzej Tobis A-Z
Museo Lázaro Galdiano, Madrid
3rd June – 28th August 2016
Curator: Bogna Świątkowska
Sources: culture.pl, beczmiana.pl. Translated by EP, July 2016.