This young and much-hailed Polish installation artist has been gaining wide recognition for her complex, architectural, site-specific works. Her pieces, known for creating a second architectural composition in dialogue with the surrounding structures, offer pointed commentary on sociological and historical issues enmeshed in various architectural projects. At the Rijksadademie in Amsterdam, where she incorporated creative freedoms that her earlier studies in Poland did not afford, she constructed a notable architectural work, Bon Voyage - an organically built structure that overtook the space it was made for and severely limited it.
This work foreshadowed Sosnowska's current approach. Now based in one of Warsaw's peripheral and disadvantaged neighborhoods, Brodno, she has been inspired by the post-war building projects that proliferated there, alongside structures that survived the war, and the occasional hollowed-out remains. Her work has been shown throughout Europe. She represented Poland in the Venice Biennale of 2007, and her important one-woman shows include the Modern Museum of Art in New York and her show at the Schaulager Institute in Basel in the spring and summer of 2008.
Loop |
1:1 |
The pavilion's entry is blocked by beams and shafts. The work presents the absurdity of a building within a building, an architectural hybrid made up of a collision and struggle between two buildings. Through this collision, Sosnowska dictates a direct, embodied encounter between two historical periods and their dominant architectural styles. This encounter encapsulates what is perhaps most familiar to the European gaze since World War II: the clash between Old Europe and its post-war architectural developments. By embodying this clash within a single building, Sosnowska sharpens the questions regarding Poland's responses to its own history, historical memory and sociology. |