Where can ecological photography go next?
Where can ecological photography go next? Ive been thinking about where ecological photography might go next. We know the familiar visual language of climate change: melting ice, burning forests, drought, pollution and…
Ive been thinking about where ecological photography might go next.
We know the familiar visual language of climate change: melting ice, burning forests, drought, pollution and damaged landscapes. But what happens when artists stop simply photographing ecological catastrophe and start questioning the relationship between the environment, the image and the person looking at it?
Three artists have been making me think about this in very different ways.
Noémie Goudal — constructing the landscape
In Post Atlantica, Goudal uses photography, film and installation to engage with palaeoclimatology and deep geological time. She constructs artificial landscapes within real environments, deliberately leaving the seams and scaffolding visible.
The landscape is both real and fabricated. The constructed image becomes a way of thinking about geological time — a scale almost impossible for us to experience.
Anaïs Tondeur — allowing the environment to make the image
In The Chernobyl Herbarium, developed with philosopher Michael Marder and biogeneticist Martin Hajduch, Tondeur creates rayograms from plants originating in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. The plants become direct photographic traces, carrying the history of the contaminated site.
In Fiori di Fuoco (Flowers of Fire), she works with ruderal plants growing in the contaminated Terra dei Fuochi in Italy, using phytography to allow the plants’ own chemistry to participate in creating the photographic trace.
The landscape is no longer simply the subject. It becomes a participant in making the image.
Meghann Riepenhoff — surrendering the image to the landscape
In Littoral Drift and Ice, Riepenhoff makes camera-less cyanotypes directly in landscapes. Waves, rain, wind, sediment and ice physically inscribe themselves into the photographic materials.
The environment isnt photographed. It helps make the photograph.
These artists have made me think about my own relationship with landscape and the photographic image.
In my own practice, the landscape increasingly moves through:
place → image → memory → reconstruction → object
This is part of the thinking behind An Echo of Presence: moving away from simply asking, “What does the landscape look like?” and towards, “What does being in a landscape reveal about us?”
What interests me is that none of these artists are simply trying to make a better picture of climate change.
They are questioning what photography can do.
Can it construct a landscape?
Can the environment participate in making the image? Can the physical forces of a place become part of the photographic process?
Perhaps the future of ecological photography isnt about finding new ways to photograph environmental catastrophe, but new ways to understand our place within the environment — and what photography can reveal about that relationship.
www.kozka.com
A photograph on a screen weighs nothing
A photograph on a screen weighs nothing. I have been working out what happens when it does. I print an image, mount it on plywood and pour resin over it. In other works I heat-form acrylic so the surface curves and the…
I have been working out what happens when it does.
I print an image, mount it on plywood and pour resin over it. In other works I heat-form acrylic so the surface curves and the image curves with it. The picture stops being a window you look through and becomes something you walk around, with edges, depth and a back.
What surprised me is how much the image changes. The same landscape reads differently when light moves across a thick, glossy surface. You notice the reflections and the small imperfections. You notice that someone made it.
That seems to matter more now that AI can produce a convincing photograph with no camera, no place and no event behind it. When images are this cheap to make, physical evidence of making counts for more.
I am not arguing that digital is bad or analogue is better. My own process moves between camera, digital editing and print before it reaches resin and acrylic, and every stage changes the image.
The question I keep coming back to: at what point does a photograph stop being a representation and become an object in its own right?
Have you owned or made a photograph where the material changed how you read the image? What was it?
Applications for the Down the Lane Artist Residency 2027 open on 1 October and…
Applications for the Down the Lane Artist Residency 2027 open on 1 October and close on 20 December 2026. We're looking for one artist to spend March 2027 making new work at Down the Lane Studios in Collingwood,…
Applications for the Down the Lane Artist Residency 2027 open on 1 October and close on 20 December 2026.
We're looking for one artist to spend March 2027 making new work at Down the Lane Studios in Collingwood, Melbourne. The residency is run by Down the Lane Studios in partnership with Culture Focus.
It grew out of my own practice, but it is not a photography residency. It is open to practising artists anywhere in the world, working in any medium and at any stage of their career.
The residency includes:
Return airfare to Melbourne
Private accommodation for the month, with its own bathroom
A private studio of about 6 x 6 metres, plus a shared workshop area
An A$500 production budget
Introductions to Melbourne's arts community
An open studio towards the end of the stay
A letter of support for international artists who need a visa
To apply, send one PDF with up to 10 images, a bio, a CV and a project plan. The application fee is A$50. A panel of artists, curators, academics and arts professionals from Melbourne and overseas will review the applications. Every applicant will hear back by 20 January 2027.
I set this up because I know how hard it is to find uninterrupted time and a decent space to make new work. This is a way of giving one artist a month where that isn't a problem.
The full brochure is attached. Find out more and apply:
https://lnkd.in/geFai8V7
Please share this with any artists you think it would suit.
Inside the Mountain
The WWI Tunnels of Lagazuoi, Dolomites The Theatre of War The Dolomites in summer are a place of extraordinary beauty, and it is easy to forget what happened here. Between 1915 and 1918 this landscape was a front line.…
The WWI Tunnels of Lagazuoi, Dolomites
The Theatre of War
The Dolomites in summer are a place of extraordinary beauty, and it is easy to forget what happened here. Between 1915 and 1918 this landscape was a front line. Italy had entered the war in May 1915, attacking Austria-Hungary along a front stretching from the Isonzo River to the high peaks of the eastern Alps. The Falzarego sector — Lagazuoi, Sasso di Stria, the Valparola pass — sat directly in the middle of it.
Both sides drew maps obsessively. The Italian tactical sketch below was produced early in the campaign, when officers were still establishing which ground they could hold. The mountains on it are the same mountains visible from the trail today: Lagazuoi, M. Castello, Valparola. The red lines are Italian positions; the dotted lines, enemy tunnels. The Austrians produced their own documents with equal precision: a photographic survey taken from the Lagazuoi ledge labels every opposing peak — Sasso di Stria, Col di Lana, Marmolata — the names of places where men were dying.
A Name on a List
Among the documents that survive from the earliest fighting here is a typed roster headed Componenti la pattuglia del 17-18 Ottobre 1915 (Sasso di Stria) — Members of the patrol of 17-18 October 1915. Sixteen names. Against each: MORTO. FERITO. ILLESO. Killed. Wounded. Unharmed.
The first name is Sottotenente Fusetti Mario — 2nd Lieutenant Mario Fusetti, the patrol commander. His designation: MORTO. He was twenty-four. The after-action report describes how 15 volunteers were called for un’ardua azione — a difficult action — to climb Sasso di Stria by night, surprise the Austrian sentries, and hold the position until reinforcements arrived. The moon was still bright. They waited, lying on the scree, for the moment to move.
The patrol of 17-18 October 1915 was one of the first Italian attempts to take Sasso di Stria, the rocky peak immediately adjacent to Lagazuoi. The mountain remained contested throughout the war. Fusetti’s death on the first night of serious fighting established the pattern: these heights were extraordinarily difficult to take and impossible to hold without the tunnel systems that both sides were already beginning to dig.
Entering the Mountain
The trail climbs steeply from Passo Falzarego before the first sign demands a pause: Elmetto e attrezzatura di sicurezza obbligatoria — helmets and safety equipment required (code L1Q, 2,667 m). The rock opens into darkness. You step from Dolomite sunlight into a tunnel barely wide enough for two people abreast. The temperature drops. The walls are wet.
The Italian army assigned the tunnel work largely to former quarrymen from the Alps — men trained since childhood in drilling and blasting rock. They worked in shifts, in passages no wider than a doorframe, using hand-operated drilling machines and chisels. By March 1917 the effort had advanced far enough to justify a permanent infrastructure: Camera motori n.1 — Engine Room No. 1 — carved into the rock at 2,530 m to provide electric power for the drills working higher into the mountain.
The Guns Inside the Rock
The tunnels were not only for movement and mining. Both sides cut weapon embrasures into the cliff faces — slits through which cannon and machine guns could cover the passes below while remaining almost invisible from outside. The Austrian tunnel plan for Sasso di Stria, drawn at 1:1000 scale, shows exactly how these systems worked: barracks, kitchen, fuel depot, machine gun posts, two named cannon positions (“Max” and “Moritz”), a searchlight stand, and an observation-telephone bunker — all connected by a single gallery running 118 metres from the lower entrance to the summit command post.
The Counter-Mine War
The Austrian MG positions map — titled Skizze über die Aufstellung der MG im Abschnitt Tre Sassi — shows overlapping fields of fire in red hatching radiating from each position. Gr. Lagazuoi 2778 m is marked in the upper right. No part of the valley floor was safe. Against this, the Italians dug.
A junction sign inside the tunnel — Camera di contromina / Lower gallery / Shoulder gallery — marks where the Italians bored a parallel gallery specifically to detect Austrian counter-mining above them. At times the two sides were separated by only a few metres of stone. Miners on both sides could hear each other working. The errori di scavo signs mark places where the Italian tunnellers lost their bearing in the dark and drilled the wrong direction for days before realising the mistake.
20 June 1917: The Mine
Everything in the tunnel complex was in preparation for one moment. On 20 June 1917, after months of drilling, digging errors, and four Austrian counter-mines — the last fired just four weeks earlier on 22 May with 30,400 kg of explosive — the Italians detonated 33,000 kilograms of blasting gelatin packed into a chamber at 2,620 m. The explosion was heard across the valley.
The sign at the chamber (code L4B) reads: Camera di mina italiana del 20 giugno 1917 — Pericolo! Even now the structure is considered unsafe. Higher up at 2,685 m the trail marker reads: Bordo cratere mina italiana del 20 giugno 1917 — edge of the crater. Standing at the lip, the explosion ceases to be a statistic. The Austrian forces had been partly warned by their own counter-mining and had evacuated some positions. The war on Lagazuoi continued until October 1917.
Between January 1916 and September 1917, five mines were detonated on Lagazuoi — three Austrian (300 kg, 16,000 kg, 30,400 kg) and two Italian, including the main charge of 33,000 kg on 20 June 1917. Across the entire Italian alpine front, 34 mines were fired between 1916 and 1918. The hard Dolomite rock made this work far more difficult than equivalent operations on the Western Front’s chalk and clay.
Living Inside the Rock
The tunnel is nearly a kilometre long and overcomes 400 metres of altitude. For stretches of the war, men lived in it almost continuously. A widened chamber on the descent preserves a reconstruction of a soldier’s quarters: wooden bunks, a mess table, a helmet, a grenade. The ceiling is black with soot. Outside in winter, temperatures reached −30°C. On White Friday, 13 December 1916, avalanches triggered by artillery killed an estimated 10,000 soldiers across the Dolomite front in a single day. Inside the mountain, men survived.
Light at the End
At intervals the gallery breaks open onto the cliff face. A steel wire keeps you from the edge. Beyond it the valley drops 500 metres. These openings were observation ports and, when necessary, gun embrasures — cannon aimed at the road and the passes below. Today they frame one of the most remarkable views in the Alps.
The tunnels eventually give way to the open ridge near the summit at 2,778 m. The QR codes on the trail markers link to an audio guide and archival photographs, adding voices to the silence. But you do not need them. The primary sources are all around you: the fractured limestone of the mine crater, the engine room bolted into rock at 2,530 m, the patrol roster where a name is followed by a single word.
Mario Fusetti was twenty-four and died on the first serious night of fighting in this sector in October 1915. The mountain was still contested two years later when the mine went off. It took a further year and the catastrophe at Caporetto — where 250,000 Italian soldiers were taken prisoner — before the front collapsed. More than 650,000 Italians died in the First World War. The Dolomites are beautiful. Inside them, the evidence of what that beauty cost is carved into the stone.
Monte Lagazuoi (2,778 m) · La Grande Guerra Heritage Trail M1 · Passo Falzarego, Cortina d’Ampezzo, Dolomites, Italy Sources: Wikipedia — Mines on the Italian Front (WWI) · lagazuoi.it · R. Striffler, Der Minenkrieg in den Dolomiten (1993) · Primary documents: Archivio storico, Museo della Grande Guerra, Cortina d’Ampezzo
Delighted to share that Shane Hulbert’s A Passive Frequency has been awarded the…
Delighted to share that Shane Hulbert’s A Passive Frequency has been awarded the Redpoll Trophy Silver Collection Award at the 2026 China–South Asia Expo (Dali) International Photography Exhibition. It was a genuine…
Delighted to share that Shane Hulbert’s A Passive Frequency has been awarded the Redpoll Trophy Silver Collection Award at the 2026 China–South Asia Expo (Dali) International Photography Exhibition.
It was a genuine pleasure to curate this exhibition and work closely with Shane on presenting this important body of work. A Passive Frequency explores the visual language of warning systems, surveillance structures and civil defence infrastructures, creating a thoughtful and timely reflection on contemporary image culture.
My sincere thanks to the team at the Dali International Photography Festival, whose professionalism, care and attention to detail resulted in an installation that served the work exceptionally well. The presentation was realised to a very high standard and contributed significantly to the success of the exhibition.
Congratulations to Shane on this well-deserved recognition. It has been rewarding to see this project connect so strongly with audiences and the festival’s collection jury.
I’m pleased to share installation views from Selenge, currently on exhibition at…
I’m pleased to share installation views from Selenge, currently on exhibition at the 2026 Dali International Photography Exhibition in Yunnan, China. Developed in northern Mongolia, Selenge explores atmosphere, memory…
I’m pleased to share installation views from Selenge, currently on exhibition at the 2026 Dali International Photography Exhibition in Yunnan, China.
Developed in northern Mongolia, Selenge explores atmosphere, memory and the experience of landscape. The landscape often felt untouched by modernity, and there were moments when history seemed less like a distant past and more like a living presence, vibrating up through the earth beneath my feet. Rather than describing a place directly, the work seeks to reconstruct the sensation of being there through shifting weather, layered gestures, distance and light.
Drawing upon both photographic practice and the visual language of landscape painting, the images occupy a space between observation and recollection, between what was seen and what remains in memory. The series is less concerned with documenting a place than with evoking the experience of standing within it.
The exhibition brings together nine large-scale works from the series. Seeing the work presented at this scale has been particularly rewarding, allowing the relationships between the images to unfold across the space and emphasising the rhythm, repetition and variation that underpin the project.
Alongside exhibiting Selenge, I also had the privilege of curating Shane Hulbert’s exhibition A Passive Frequency. It has been a pleasure to present two distinct Australian photographic voices within the context of this international exhibition.
My sincere thanks to the organisers, curators, artists and visitors who have contributed to making this exhibition possible.
WROCLAW, UNEXPECTEDLY, June 2026
A day in the galleries of one of Central Europe's most vital art cities I arrived in Wroclaw from Krakow, where I had spent a few absorbing days. Krakow was as it always is: layered, beautiful, slightly self-aware of…
A day in the galleries of one of Central Europe's most vital art cities
I arrived in Wroclaw from Krakow, where I had spent a few absorbing days. Krakow was as it always is: layered, beautiful, slightly self-aware of its own historic weight. Wroclaw, when I had last visited years before, had felt different in character, looser somehow, more willing to surprise. I came back wanting simply to reacquaint myself with the city. I was not expecting to find a gallery scene as genuinely alive as what I encountered.
My last day there, I made a loose plan: four or five spaces, a walking route through the old town. What I found in those hours exceeded anything I had hoped for, and I left with the strong impression that there is something happening here that the wider art world has not yet caught up to. There are more galleries and spaces I did not manage to reach; what follows is what I did see, and what stayed with me.
SOLASTALGIA
Internets, Kebabs, Alcohols, Gravestones
Szymon Roginski at FOTO-GEN Galeria
FOTO-GEN Galeria sits in the old town, its interior divided between a clean white entrance gallery and a vaulted brick space that opens out below like a kind of urban cellar. Above the VR area, through the glass roof, you can read the FOTO-GEN GALERIA sign hanging against the sky. It was here that I encountered Szymon Roginski's SOLASTALGIA, an exhibition that had already claimed my attention before I stepped inside, simply because of its title.
The word was proposed in 2010 by Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht to describe a very specific kind of grief: the distress caused not by leaving a familiar place, but by watching it change around you. Homesickness, but you have never left home. The landscape rewrites itself and you are left in a place that no longer quite corresponds to the one stored in your memory. Roginski applies this concept to contemporary Poland, and particularly to the small towns that have undergone the most dramatic transformation since 1989, not from wars or heavy industry, but from something more ordinary and therefore harder to argue against: roads, housing estates, phone masts, advertising, globalised commerce.
The exhibition structures this around four photographic series, each shown on monitors: Internets, Kebabs, Alcohols, Gravestones. The list reads like a vernacular inventory of what has arrived in provincial Poland over the past few decades and quietly rearranged everything. Roginski photographs with telephoto and wide-angle lenses and from drone altitude, shifting between the intimate and the panoramic. He is interested in both the emotional register of individuals and the cumulative, aerial picture of transformation that no single resident can see.
Alongside the monitor series, the exhibition includes a sound installation and three-dimensional sculptures: distorted architectural models derived from VR scans of real sites, accompanied by large expressive prints generated from within the virtual environment. These works complete a loop: reality is scanned into virtual space, which is then brought back into physical form, changed in the translation. The architecture emerges slightly wrong, compressed or stretched, like a memory that has been accessed too many times.
The VR component, also titled Solastalgia, was set up in a corner of the upper atrium on an ergonomic chair. I put the headset on. Inside, scanned landscapes of small Polish towns had been reconstructed and then subtly distorted, familiar enough to recognise as real places, strange enough to register as something other than documentation. You navigate through spaces that are both there and not there, places that existed as they were scanned and have continued to change since. It is a meditation on the impossibility of preserving a place even in data.
I stayed in longer than I expected. There is something about the medium that makes the solastalgia of the title literal rather than metaphorical: you are physically inside a landscape that no longer fully exists. For anyone working with questions of how places are documented, reconstructed, and experienced at a distance from reality, the show has an extra layer of resonance. Roginski approaches these questions through long-term documentary series and VR reconstruction; the underlying concern, about what it means to lose a landscape and how technology mediates that loss, runs through a great deal of practice that is nominally about different things.
SUPERUSER_DO
WRO Art Center
The WRO Art Center was showing a group exhibition of student work from the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. Eight artists, each from a different Polish city, and the overall effect was of a generation working through genuinely urgent questions about technology, ecology, and the relationship between the two.
The main hall, a large barn-like space with exposed wooden beams and high ceilings, was given over to three installations that occupied the room together, each generating its own atmosphere while coexisting in a shared red-tinged light.
Piotr Stechura's Raceful Dead is built around a humanoid figure in a running start position, wearing a structure that resembles a backpack but which is made from fragments of motorcycles and scooters, designed and 3D printed entirely in resin. The work is interested in the tension between support and oppression in the relationship between humans and technology: structures designed as aids that over time begin to act as burdens, accumulating their own logic, imposing their own demands. The title references the Running Man motif from the 1987 animated anthology Neo Tokyo. The figure performs mechanical movements and emits sounds processed through an AI model.
Jagoda Golinska's W Twojej skórze (In Your Skin) takes a different approach to a related question. At its core is a flexible membrane, circular, backlit in deep red, enclosed in a ring of wire and cabling. The membrane moves inward and outward, responding solely to the presence of a human body. The work is framed as a reflection on humanity's long desire to create artificial life, but also on the God complex embedded in that desire, the creator's claim to make autonomous beings while refusing to relinquish absolute power over what has been made.
Agata PLK Polak's Mycosphere 3.0 occupied a large scaffolding structure threaded with mycelium connected to electronic systems converting biological signals into audible sound. It proposed something genuinely strange: that the communication structures of fungal networks might offer a model for rethinking how we build and understand digital networks. The combination of living biological matter, industrial scaffolding, and CCTV cameras gave the installation an uneasy, layered energy. The cameras created a surveillance atmosphere that sat in deliberate tension with the ecological optimism at the centre of the concept. Polak received both the 3P Studio Special Award and the Contemporary Lynx Editors' Award.
Ilo Sekowska-Lenart's Panstwo Mlodzi (The Newlyweds) occupied its own room arranged as a distorted 1990s Polish wedding hall: white tablecloths, white plates, gypsophila in small vases, and along three walls, monitors looping footage from the artist's family archive, her parents' actual wedding, with the faces of the bride and groom replaced using deepfake AI and the faces of all the guests obscured with black bars.
On the tables, instead of plates of food, are five small tablets, each displaying an AI-animated monidlo, a traditional portrait format, here drawn from virtual collections of cultural centres in Lesna Podlaska and Kadzidlo. These animated figures recite fragments of LGBTQ manifestos. By staging a tradition from which queer people are explicitly excluded, the work turns the wedding hall into a space that holds what that tradition refuses.
On the mezzanine level, Jozef Jakacki's aparat milczy, ja mowie (the camera is silent, I speak) presented two suspended screens alongside the modified camera at the centre of the work. Jakacki removed the shutter from an analog camera and exposed the film using the film-winding mechanism alone, producing images as colored streaks on positive film. A flash mechanism separated from the camera is synchronized with the recorded performance: it no longer captures reality but echoes the photographed event, operating as a looped device measuring time. Jakacki won the Magazyn Format Editors Award for the work.
ALL THE DIAMONDS
Wszystkie Diamenty / Toate Diamantele
Krupa Art Foundation
The Krupa Art Foundation was the most substantial stop of the day, and the one I had least anticipated. The main exhibition, All the Diamonds / Wszystkie Diamenty / Toate Diamantele, brought together artists from Poland, Romania, and beyond, and it had the unmistakable feel of a deeply considered curatorial project rather than a survey. The three-language title signals the exhibition's core axis: a sustained conversation between Polish and Romanian contemporary art.
The Romanian painter Andrei Tudoran opened the show, in the sense that his work was among the first I encountered. His two paintings, both titled Viva la Vida after the Frida Kahlo series of late watermelons, approach painting's deliberate slowness as a form of resistance. One is oil on wood from 2025, the other on canvas from 2026; both are small, almost intimate, dealing with the fragility of constructs, social and economic and political, that Kahlo's life and work both reflected and challenged.
Iza Tarasewicz's Looped Processions I (2022) was one of the exhibition's genuinely commanding works. Two pieces in oxidised steel and wire, each about a metre high and over a metre in diameter, the forms describe a choreography rooted in communal labour, invoking the mazurka while engaging with philosopher Raymond Tallis's theory of the human thumb as the anatomical foundation of complex tool use.
Karolina Lebek's Plexus (2024): two large white textile panels woven from grasses and wildflowers using traditional methods. Maciej Cholewa's steel gate, The Gate for all of those who left small towns and gone to Warsaw (2019), carried the full weight of what the title describes: vernacular county-town metalwork charged with the mass internal migration of young Poles toward the capital, what Cholewa calls "Poland B."
Anio Ciutac's Bread and Salt (2025) shaped a Romanian tradition of offering bread and salt to guests into a ceramic and textile altar arrangement. Anna Raczynska's Future Primitive (2021) made a euro sign from bundled wheat, wildflowers, and hay: the symbol is recognisable at once, the materials complicate that recognition immediately.
Serban Savu's Father and Son SS/P 21111 (2021), a large oil on canvas at 195 by 150 centimetres from the Krupa Collection, anchored the final room. Savu works in pseudo-documentary realism; cables are a recurring motif in his paintings of the Romanian landscape, and here they anchor a melancholic narrative about the collapse of empire.
NA NAS JUZ CZAS
It's Time for Us
KAF Project Space — Pawel Althamer and Artur Zmijewski
Through a door at the back of the main foundation space, a sign read: "behind these doors intuition awaits." The KAF Project Space hosted Na nas juz czas / It's Time for Us, a joint exhibition by Pawel Althamer and Artur Zmijewski, two artists whose decades-long collaboration is one of the defining working relationships in Polish contemporary art.
Althamer's figures, made from organic and found materials, have always had something uncanny about them, a sense of being inhabited in ways conventional sculpture is not. The standing figure near the entrance had this quality; so did the two recumbent forms lying in coffin-like strucWEAtures.
WHE anY given piece was by Althamer, Zmijewski, or somewhere between them was deliberately ambiguous. That ambiguity is part of the collaboration.
ANOTHER PLANET ENTIRELY
Muzeum Wspolczesne Wroclaw
The Muzeum Wspolczesne Wroclaw is housed in a building that earns its own paragraph. Originally constructed in 1942 as an anti-aircraft shelter, the six-storey cylindrical structure sits on a circular plan some 31 metres in diameter. Its reinforced concrete walls are over a metre thick. The corridors radiate outward from a central staircase like the passageways of an unusual machine, and this geometry shapes every exhibition held within it. You are never entirely unaware that you are inside a structure that was built to outlast bombardment.
Marco Angelini's solo exhibition made direct use of this context. Angelini works with solar energy as both subject and material, and the show moved between painted canvases, lightbox installations, and works incorporating actual photovoltaic cells.
The largest room held a sequence of geometric canvases in vivid colour combinations: pink and violet, yellow and navy, each featuring solar panel cells as the primary compositional element. Painted with precision and a flat boldness, they feel somewhere between the Constructivists and a graphic language specific to contemporary energy infrastructure. They are paintings about technology, but they are also, formally, very good paintings.
A smaller, darker room held the lightbox works. A Friend from South America (2021) is a lightbox incorporating medical X-rays of knee joints, over which Angelini has poured fluid pigment in blues and browns. The Spanish text "de pie," meaning "standing," is visible on the X-ray plate.
Yinka Shonibare's Planets in My Head, Young Geologist (2019) occupied its own room with the presence of something that knows exactly what it is. A fiberglass mannequin dressed in Dutch wax-print batik fabric, the head replaced by a dark globe mapped with constellations named after significant geologists, the figure leans over a Victorian theodolite on a tripod. The object is dense with the layered ironies that characterise Shonibare's practice: the batik fabric produced in Indonesia, sold in the Netherlands, and associated in the Western imagination with West Africa. The globe itself was made by Bellerby in London.
Elsewhere in the building, Laboratorium Barw presented Indigo, a collaborative installation by Patrycja Mastej and Magdalena Skowronska. The project takes individual colours as the basis for immersive sensory environments, and the room dedicated to indigo was organised around the following register: intuition, insight, perception, vision, dream, imagination, the invisible, inner clarity, self-awareness. These are not properties of the colour so much as states the colour is supposed to facilitate. It positions itself as an exposure rather than a display, a room you enter in order to have an experience shaped by indigo rather than to look at something described by it.
Laboratorium Barw: Indigo. Exhibition caption. Patrycja Mastej and Magdalena Skowronska. Muzeum Wspolczesne Wroclaw.
The final space I entered at the museum was a room that stopped me at the threshold. A UV blacklight installation covered every surface of one of the building's cylindrical tunnel spaces: the curved walls entirely given over to a mural in UV-reactive paint, featuring eyes, jellyfish-like forms, wings, hands, spirals, and coral-like branches assembled from a vocabulary somewhere between the microscopic and the cosmic. Circular platforms on the floor were painted with geometric grid patterns and central eye motifs. A cluster of mirror balls hung from the ceiling and scattered reflected light across everything. I could not find a caption identifying the artist. But the experience of the room was one of the strongest single installations I encountered in some time.
UV blacklight installation, installation view. Muzeum Wspolczesne Wroclaw. Artist unconfirmed.
UV blacklight installation, detail: floor platform with eye motif and mirror ball reflections. Muzeum Wspolczesne Wroclaw.
AFTERWARDS
By the time I left the Muzeum Wspolczesne Wroclaw it was late afternoon. I walked back through the old town and found myself thinking that this is exactly the kind of city that rewards a day spent in galleries. Not a single landmark, not a programme of monuments, but a circuit of spaces paying serious attention to what art can do and say right now.
Wroclaw has an unusual history, even by Central European standards: German until 1945, Polish thereafter, the population transferred, the name changed, the architecture preserved partly by choice and partly by the effort of rebuilding from rubble. A city acutely aware of how cultures and identities are constructed rather than simply given. It may be no accident that the exhibitions I saw were preoccupied with exactly these questions: what we carry, what gets lost in translation, who owns a symbol, what labour means, who the future is for, and what it feels like when the landscape you grew up in is quietly replaced by something you did not choose.
I did not see everything. There are galleries and spaces I did not reach. What I did see was enough to make clear that a return visit, with more time and better planning, is not optional.
Wroclaw, June 2026
From Naxos to Kraków: The World of Si On at Bunkier Sztuki
Ur So Pretty II Having just completed a month-long residency on the Greek island of Naxos, I arrived in Kraków expecting little more than a few quiet days reconnecting with a city that holds a particular significance…
Having just completed a month-long residency on the Greek island of Naxos, I arrived in Kraków expecting little more than a few quiet days reconnecting with a city that holds a particular significance for me. Although I was born and raised in Australia, my family history is bound up with Poland, shaped, like so many Polish family histories, by war and displacement long before I existed. Every visit therefore carries a faint sense of recognition that sits underneath the ordinary business of being a traveller. What I did not anticipate was that the most interesting and unusual encounters of the trip would be with the work of a South Korean artist, and that it would take place at Bunkier Sztuki, Kraków's gallery of contemporary art.
The convergence was an unlikely one. I had spent weeks on a small Aegean island thinking about landscape, memory and the slow accumulation of an image, and I had come to a city my family left under duress, only to stand in front of paintings made by an artist who was born in Korea, trained in Japan, passed through New York and has now lived and worked in Kraków for several years. Contemporary art produces these intersections more often than we admit, but rarely so neatly. It is also a useful reminder that Poland, a country whose recent cultural narrative has often been told in terms of emigration and loss, is now quietly a place that artists from elsewhere choose to settle in and build from. Si On has apparently been present in the city for years while remaining almost invisible within its art scene, which makes this first institutional solo exhibition feel less like an introduction and more like a long overdue recognition.
The gallery deserves a few words of its own before the work, because the building does a great deal of the curatorial labour here. Bunkier Sztuki occupies one of the few genuinely brutalist structures in Poland, a 1960s concrete pavilion set into the green ring of the Planty, with fragments of an old granary embedded in its façade. That rough, fortress-like quality gave it the nickname that eventually became its official name. The gallery reopened in 2024 after three years of renovation, and the refreshed interior turns out to be an ideal container for an exhibition of this ambition. The spaces are generous without being precious, and they allow very large paintings, freestanding sculptures and fully wrapped rooms to coexist without competing. On my previous visit the surrounding parkland had been deep in snow and the cultural programme had effectively closed for Christmas, so seeing the building open, busy and ringed by summer foliage felt like encountering a different institution altogether.
The exhibition is titled "The Magic Woman and Other Stories", and the title is accurate in a way that most exhibition titles are not. This is not a display of discrete works hung in sequence. It is closer to a constructed world, populated by recurring figures that move between paintings, sculptures and video as though they all belong to the same expanding mythology. The curatorial framing is itself unusual. The exhibition is the curatorial debut of the novelist Dorota Masłowska, and rather than imposing an interpretive structure she has answered Si On's images with a literary text of her own, written as a parallel narrative that runs alongside the work without explaining it. The result is two authors occupying the same rooms, one in paint and one in language, neither subordinate to the other. For anyone interested in translation and the gaps that open between cultures, and I count myself firmly among them, that arrangement is quietly fascinating, particularly since Masłowska is writing about an artist whose first language is not the one the text is composed in.
What gives the whole environment its coherence is a logic of transformation. Si On comes from a family with shamanic traditions and has spoken about her own practice as a form of shamanism, and once you know this the exhibition reorganises itself around the idea. Bodies do not stay put. Figures emerge from vegetation, dissolve into wallpaper, swell to the scale of landscape or shrink into something cradled and dependent. The artist is, by all accounts, a physically small person, and there is something pointed in the fact that she paints herself enormous, predatory and frequently monstrous. The curatorial text gives these recurring beings a name, the SiOnoids, and describes them as legions of an unbreakable self sent out into the world. That framing is more useful than it first sounds. It explains why the figures never resolve into conventional self-portraits and never settle into a single readable emotion. They are versions, drafts, alternative selves, and the exhibition is the theatre in which they are staged.
The painting Nursing is the clearest demonstration of how this works. A monumental female figure rises out of dense foliage, holding a much smaller adult figure who is wearing headphones. The title points towards care and protection, but the image withholds any comfortable reading. The reversal of scale is the key move. The larger figure becomes almost geological in her presence, while the smaller one reads as protected and confined at the same time, and the surrounding plants and small watchful creatures are not decorative filler but active participants in the scene. The painting ends up posing a genuinely difficult question about dependency, about where nurture ends and control begins, and about how the relationships that shaped us in childhood continue to organise us long after we believe we have outgrown them. It is visually spectacular, but it is the emotional ambiguity that stays with you.
Nearby, a work titled Born With a Void (Nice) stopped me for longer than anything else in the building. The title alone is remarkable, and the figure carries an expression that manages to be exhausted, knowing, vulnerable and faintly defiant all at once. As someone whose own practice circles constantly around absence, I found myself unusually implicated by it. In my work the void tends to be spatial and technical: the missing data in a point cloud, the deliberate emptiness that shanshui painting calls liú bái, the atmospheric blankness that gives an image room to breathe and lets the imagination do its work. Si On approaches emptiness from an entirely different direction, treating the void as emotional and existential rather than formal, something a person is born carrying rather than something acquired through loss. Yet the underlying proposition is strikingly similar. The void is not presented as deficiency. It is presented as a generative condition, a space that shapes us and that we negotiate, and that recasting of absence as productive rather than negative is one of the quiet intelligences running through the whole exhibition.
The room I enjoyed most, and the one I suspect most visitors remember, is the installation wrapped floor to ceiling in floral wallpaper. The first impression is entirely benign. The colours are warm, the pattern reads as domestic and cheerful, and the furniture suggests a lived-in interior. Then the faces begin to appear. Creatures surface between the flowers, eyes open where you did not expect them, and small distorted figures reveal themselves the longer you stand still. The decorative slowly becomes psychological, and the comfortable becomes uneasy, until the entire room reads as a subconscious rendered as interior decoration. What impressed me was less the imagery than the understanding of how people actually occupy a space over time. The piece is built on the knowledge that a viewer's first impression will be comfort, the second curiosity and the third disquiet, and it stages that sequence deliberately. As a strategy for making domestic space carry psychological weight it is both clever and genuinely unsettling.
The sculptures extend these concerns into three dimensions and are, for me, where the exhibition's preoccupation with the body becomes most physical. Works such as Queen from the Wasted Land have an almost archaeological quality. Their surfaces accumulate stones, shells, organic fragments, paint and debris, so that they read less like objects that were modelled and more like objects that grew, gathering the evidence of time as they went. They brought Władysław Hasior to mind, and his rough, ritualistic assemblages drawn from Polish folk tradition, which is a comparison I suspect Si On might welcome, given how openly her work engages with folk and popular registers. The body, in these pieces, is not a fixed form to be represented but a site of struggle and transformation, a surface on which experience is deposited. The corporeal becomes a kind of biography, and the material itself becomes memory, which is a very different proposition from the idealised or contained body that sculpture has traditionally offered.
It would be easy to make all of this sound heavy, and the genuine surprise of the exhibition is that it is not. Humour runs through everything. There are figures in knitted hoodies bearing unmistakable sportswear logos, references to consumer culture lodged inside folk-art idioms, cartoonish characters and grotesque faces that make you laugh before you have worked out why you should perhaps be uneasy. The humour is not decoration and it is not a softening agent. It functions much as the trickster does in mythology, destabilising categories and using absurdity to make difficult material approachable. Consumer culture, loneliness, instability and the fragmentation of identity all become discussable precisely because they arrive wrapped in play. Many artists working with trauma and selfhood become earnest to the point of airlessness, and the work suffers for it. Si On consistently avoids that trap, and the generosity of the approach, the willingness to let a viewer in through pleasure before asking anything harder of them, is rarer than it should be.
If the exhibition has a single organising statement it is probably the one that gives a work its title, I Am More Than Oneself. The figures are fragments of identity rather than portraits of individuals, and the whole environment proceeds from the conviction that a person is plural rather than singular: a child and an adult at once, a carer and a dependant, a confident self and a frightened one, the person we are and the several people we are still becoming. In an art world, and a wider culture, increasingly preoccupied with fixed categories and stable, legible identities, there is something bracing about an artist who insists on multiplicity and is content to leave her contradictions unresolved. The exhibition does not reconcile care with control, or humour with grief, or nature with culture. It simply allows them to occupy the same space, which is, after all, how they tend to occupy a life.
Walking back through the Planty afterwards, I kept returning to the chain of circumstances that had delivered me to those rooms. A Korean artist building a body of work in Poland, an Australian with Polish roots arriving from a Greek residency, a contemporary gallery housed in a brutalist bunker in a city shaped by centuries of migration and reinvention. On paper these are unrelated stories. Inside the exhibition they did not feel unrelated at all, because Si On's real subject is transformation as lived experience: the transformation of identity, of memory, of relationships, and of the people who move between countries and cultures and carry the residue of each. That is what I think the exhibition contributes to contemporary painting and installation, beyond its considerable visual ambition. It treats mythology not as a set of inherited stories but as a working system for making psychological experience visible, and it refuses the now familiar separation of beauty from discomfort, offering both at full strength and trusting the viewer to hold them together. I left without the feeling that I had understood it, which is usually the surest sign that an exhibition is worth remembering. Arriving in Kraków as I did, carrying my own complicated relationship to place, family and memory, it proved to be exactly the right work at exactly the right moment.
Bronisław Kózka.