The Photographers' Gallery 16 - 18 Ramillies Street W1F 7LW London Royaume-Uni
The Agency is pleased to present a solo project by the young Polish artist Alicja Dobrucka. She is the Winner of the Deutsche Bank Award in Photography at the University of the Arts London 2010. She is presenting an evolving series of recent and new photographic works shot in Poland.
“[…]The condition of life under late capitalism is often described as “precarious”: we hear references to precarious labour in the globalised market; a precarious future facing retirees, students and prospective house-buyers; the precarious lives of refugees and illegal immigrants. The political condition of instability and insecurity is also underpinned by a metaphysical sense of the transience of things, one that led German philosopher Martin Heidegger to describe being in the world as “being-toward-death”.
Alicja Dobrucka’s evolving practice, temporarily stabilized and collected in her recent project, “I like you, I like you a lot”, powerfully encapsulates this double meaning of precariousness. Ostensibly a reflection on the artist’s and her family’s bereavement after the sudden tragic loss of her younger brother, the work opens up the personal space of mourning to broader affects and questions about vulnerability, youth, motherhood, domesticity and the passage of time. [...]”
excerpt from a text by Joanna Zylinska, Reader in New Media and Communications at Goldsmiths
The new work forms part of the follow up series to I like you, I like you a lot, the work, which Joanna Zylinska describes in her text about Dobrucka’s photographs. Departing from chronicling loss, Dobrucka has begun to focus on the objects, which used to belong to the deceased as still lives. No longer memento mori, they tell of social belonging, tribal behaviour amongst youths who identify with an uncomfortable mix of past communist state culture and a Ramboesque US military style.
The objects are grim, with the collection of gas masks, television and army boots giving an eerie, but also quite realistic slant to the notional teenage bedroom. The hidden teddy bear under the television console adjusts the reading of the image subtly and precisely. A sense of foreboding also emanates from the image of a cuddly toy hanging form the side of a bedpost at night. Dobrucka’s direction of the available artificial light sources gives the image of a harmless toy a nightmarish quality, conveying the photographer’s own unease without giving the viewer any narrative.
Directing existing light sources to heighten drama is an approach Dobrucka uses effectively in her landscape photographs. They are experienced subjectively through the lens of the photographer. Landscape here is a place on the edge of a city, devoid of people but not untouched, where in darkness wheelie bins are set on fire, the very setting where a precarious life may be lived.
