photographs
digital print on cotton fabric

This series of photographs enters into dialogue with the oeuvre of Swetlana Zerling, whose ceramic sculptures and reliefs are embedded in the public spaces of Żabianka. These works were created as part of the Ceramics for Architecture open-air workshops held in the 1970s in Kadyny at the initiative of Edward Roguszczak. Ideas developed there were subsequently realised over the years in newly built housing estates in Gdańsk, including Żabianka, Morena and Zaspa.

Monika Orpik’s project takes as its starting point Zerling’s reliefs, which the artist herself described as ‘places where a person could hide, nestle’. Here, the gesture of nestling becomes above all a way of forming a relationship with space – an attempt to find shelter, closeness and a sense of belonging within it. The work treats space not as a neutral backdrop to human experience, but as an active participant in that relationship. The sculpture becomes a place that preserves a presence while also revealing its absence.

The artist on her work:

I look at what happens at the meeting point between body and place: the emotions, gestures and forms of bodily presence that a space brings into play, as well as the ways in which the space itself responds to human presence. I am also interested in the moment of withdrawal – the instant when the body leaves a place behind, leaving a trace of itself.

MONIKA ORPIK

is a multimedia artist born in Poland in 1997. Her practice spans writing, sound, film and photography. She is interested in the foundations of language, particularly modes of communication and mechanisms of misinterpretation. Orpik examines how words and meanings are transformed through processes such as multilingualism, shifts in syntax and removal from context. Overheard conversations and observations of body language often provide source material for her work. She lives and works in Cologne, Germany.