Vendredi 15 Mai 2015 17:28:09 par Clarisse Treilles dans Expositions

Lookout Gallery will put on show a project titled “Dead Vistula” by the photographer Mateusz Kiszka. The exhibition will consist of series of photographs documenting the landscape along the so-called Dead Vistula, the biggest Polish river's artificial Baltic Sea estuary. While wandering, the artist photographed deserted fragments of the urban fabric along the Dead Vistula riverside – the silent witnesses of history. His photographs depict wrecks of British ships supplying food after the World War II, a dike built by the Dutch settlers in the 17th century, the decaying Gdansk Shipyard, Westerplatte or dying out fishing villages. As the artist himself wrote: “the photographs were created out of the urge 'to save' the landscape which is disappearing irrevocably”.

Mateusz Kiszka wandered along twenty four kilometers long arm of the Vistula (formerly the river's main estruary), which as a result of the ditch made in the years 1890-1895 in Świbno was regulating the Vistula's tracks during the spring thaw. While wandering, the artist photographed deserted fragments of the urban fabric along the Dead Vistula riverside – the silent witnesses of history. His photographs depict wrecks of British ships supplying food after the World War II, rickety vegetation, a dike built by the Dutch settlers in the 17th century, the decaying Gdansk Shipyard, Westerplatte or dying out fishing villages. The works presented within the exhibition, made with a large-format camera 4x5", were taken between January and April 2012.

© Mateusz Kiszka, Untitled form the series Dead Vistula, 2012