Monika Sosnowska, Fir Tree, 2012, photo: Public Art Fund
ACCA in Melbourne, Australia, is going to feature the first major Southern Hemisphere presentation by Monika Sosnowska. The exhibition will contain a series of site-specific interventions inside the venue.
For the exhibition Regional Modernities, the artist is going to present a series of works in all four galleries of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art – each of them will offer a reinterpreatation or a counterpoint to the venue's large, angular interior. These will include an oppressive concrete bunker in the corner of one gallery, while another space will become one of Sosnowska’s famous 'institutional corridors', where, despite the illusion of distance, the passageway in reality is far too narrow to enter without crawling.
Juliana Engberg, Artistic Director of ACCA comments:
Monika's sculptural works represent more than mere form. They are epic objects in which history, politics and the drama of Warsaw's evolving urban fabric are twisted and reshapen as totems and impossible spaces […] Monika's works represent a tradition of modernity from the Soviet edifice to the struggling, emergent new Poland which must confront its past while it shapes its future.
The Australian show was preceded by a site-specific commission in New York City’s Central Park, titled Fir Tree (2012). The artist used for that piece pulleys, cranes and other heavy machinery in order to manipulate a spiral staircase resembling a 12-metre evergreen tree. No longer climbable, the stairs cascaded around the central shaft of the sculpture like weighted tree limbs, surrounded by a red ribbon of the railing – now purely decorative. The sculpture fostered the impression that skyscrapers, the flora of the cities, could have their steel roots hidden deep below the pavements.
Andria Hickey, associate curator of the public art commission, said:
This once-functional object refuses to serve its intended purpose. Instead it becomes an animated and outsized metaphor, testing the bounds of a familiar form as it reaches toward the urban skyline.
Sosnowska (born 1972) studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań, but soon found that the "painting started to escape her canvas" during her final years of study. Sosnowska’s work uses space as its medium, and explores our psychological relationship to the built environment, creating complex, large-scale installations that alter our perceptions of familiar objects and spaces. She first came to prominence with the 1:1 sculpture she created for the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2007), where she squeezed a bent fragment of modern architecture into the 1930s Polonia Pavilion, as if the two "buildings have been constructed in the space and have to live in symbiosis, or…to fight or wrestle with each other".
Monika Sosnowska: Regional Modernities
10.08-29.09.2013
111 Sturt Street
Southbank
Victoria 3006
Australia
Sources: press materials, www.publicartfund.org
Ed. Anna Micińska 24.07.2013