Mellow Apocalypse (Ludwik Zamenhof Centre, Bialystok, Poland)

Exhibition period: 27.09.2024.-20.10.2024. (during Interphoto festival)
The world of images is becoming increasingly saturated, and our ability to grasp and understand it is becoming increasingly limited. Poetically speaking, the map has become larger than the territory. I am interested in the fate of canonized artistic, scientific, and journalistic images and their potential to embody contemporary meanings. Institutions that select, preserve, and intentionally create collections of images in art, science, and journalism have acquired a status of cultural authority. The collections of these institutions are considered a "golden heritage" of visual culture, to be preserved for the future. In my collages, I utilize images from open resources of art museums, scientific institutions, and various image banks, whose archives can be considered iconic testimonies of the present and the past. The collages are based on my exploration of the syntactic connections of visual language in images from different periods, media, and fields of visual culture. The collages draw on ideas and technical codes established in visual communication that transcend the boundaries of eras, media, and cultures. These codes are so deeply ingrained in culture that they are used without thought and understood by viewers through pre-existing mental schemas. Although the decoding of images depends on the interests, values, beliefs, and desires of the viewers, the globalized world of visual culture is saturated with simulacra, where the feminine and the masculine, the other, the desirable, the repulsive, and the beautiful are represented through similar ideas and technical codes across different eras and media. These syntactic connections across different periods of visual culture and media are traced in the postures and gestures of individuals, in the color schemes, and in the similar representation of objects and architecture. The technical execution of collages relies on image post-processing software algorithms, allowing them to capture the accuracy and precision of the image representation. In this way, digital post-processing functions become part of the collages' semantic and technical code.