Monika Sosnowska
7/08

Previous / Next Artist

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.
 

Sosnowska's residency in July 2008 included strong moments in both urban and natural landscape in Israel.  Her trip from the Dead Sea to Jerusalem and then toTel Aviv took her from the desert to the mountains and then to a city set on flatlands and the sea.  These strong contrasts were extremely powerful for the Polish artist.  Sosnowska later had a thorough architectural tour of Tel Aviv with architect Zvi Elhyani, complete with sociological and historical explanations. She had a concentrated taste of the art scene during Tel Aviv's White Night, when museums and galleries are open into the night, and the city is alive with street shows and music, and found that Tel Aviv is not unlike Warsaw, with its many centers and chaotic mix of building styles.
Sosnowska lecured on her work at the Bezalel Academy's Masters Program in Tel Aviv to a rapped crowd of artists and curators.  Her lecture opened, unusually, not with her own work but with photographs of Warsaw and its environs that introduced the architectural surroundings she is responding to. She followed with in-depth discussion of several of her pieces. Thanks to the opening, the audience was then able to see the sociological, political and historical ramifications of her work.
 
Loop

One of Sosnowska's many explorations of the qualities of architectural space, this work spins a winding labyrinth of corridors. The piece, installed at the Kunstmuseum in Liechtenstein in 2007, creates an illusory, elusive interior, distorting our perspective and sense of dimension.  The work reminds one of two earlier, untitled pieces.  One, shown at the 8th Istanbul Biennial in 2003, offered another impossible interior: a corridor painted in early 70s style, curves sharply to the right; the second corridor one arrives at is too narrow for human passsage, and the seemingly close open door at its end remains an impossible  taunt.  Another work, shown at the Modern Institute in Glasgow in 2005, was composed of a corridor made of a series of doors.   The piece, which gives the viewer the feeling of an interior viewed through a mirror, is an echoing space, full of repetitious elements, such as doors, door handles, door posts and windows. These combine to offer an unacanny, dreamlike effect, ever reminiscent of other problematic interiors. Sosnowska sends spectators into an active exploration of visual twists that interrupt our normal, banal expectations of interior space, and through this process translates physical interiors and experiences into mental spaces and insights.  The physical situations she creates thus offer immediate philosophical experiences.
 
1:1

In this installation, made for the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007, Sosnowska implanted a metallic construction that resembles the underpinnings of a communist building project into the Biennale's monumental, white, pre-war Polish Pavilion. The twisted, metallic skeleton is jammed into the older, elegant 1930's building, which emanates tradition and power.
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.