Artist
Ada Zielińska
My name is Ada Zielińska, I am from Warsaw, Poland. I am a visual artist, working in the field of photography and installation. In 2016, I graduated with a Master degree from the “Media Art” faculty at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Most recently I studied at the Institute of Creative Photography in Opava, Czech Republic.
In my works I am exploring the idea of destruction and documenting the catastrophe that surrounds me, confronting myself with material disintegration. This artistic practice serves me as a specific self-therapy, an attempt to control what is inevitably going to end. My fascination towards destruction constantly evolves. It manifests in the series Automotive Skills (staging car crashes on the purpose of photography); Cold Juxtaposition (a comparison study of defects on cars and humans); or Pyromaniac’s Manual book, in which I arranged car fires to catch the furious moment of disintegration. My latest on-going project is Post-Tourism.
Through-out my practice, I have documented meaningful moments in the modern history of Poland — i.e the Czarny Protest in 2016, and in 2018 my photograph “Independence Day” was widely acclaimed. It was announced as the Picture of the Year by portal culture.pl in 2018, and the same year it was included in the Harvard Library’s collection “Independence March Collection”.
Post-tourism
My latest ongoing project is Post-Tourism, in which I travel to world sites affected by natural disasters. As part of this project, I visited California during the 2018-19 wildfires, Paris shortly after the Notre Dame fire, Venice during the 2019 flood and Australia during the 2020 bushfires.
Portfolio: Ada Zielińska
In my works I am exploring the idea of destruction and documenting the catastrophe that surrounds me, confronting myself with material disintegration. This artistic practice serves me as a specific self-therapy, an attempt to control what is inevitably going to end. My fascination towards destruction constantly evolves. It manifests in the series Automotive Skills (staging car crashes on the purpose of photography); Cold Juxtaposition (a comparison study of defects on cars and humans); or Pyromaniac’s Manual book, in which I arranged car fires to catch the furious moment of disintegration.
Russia’s Marina Istomina and Poland’s Ada Zielińska both break from the conventions of what is known as disaster photography. After experiencing first hand the wildfires engulfing her native Siberia summer after summer, Istomina captures the crisis through a redemptive fairytale: warning us about greed, power, and
ultimately the tricksters of the woods. The daughter of a firefighter, Zielińska, too, is fascinated with fire, specifically what it means to be a witness to catas- trophe. For her ongoing series, Post-Tourism, she travelled to four places: California during the 2018-19 wildfires, Paris shortly after the 2019 Notre Dame fire, Venice during the 2019 flood, and Australia during the 2020 bushfires. The Polish artist doesn’t err on the side of caution, often playing the role of pyromaniac and using chaos and provocation as fuel in her practice.
Bogdan Shirokov trained his lens in fashion and editorial photography but has been working on what he calls a life-long personal project: looking at different facets of contemporary masculinity and queerness in Russia. For Shirokov, photography is first and foremost a type of refuge and a contemplative space for the viewer, one he physically expands with installation and sculpture.
Marat Dilman offers a glimpse into nation-building in his native Kazakhstan, from the showpiece architecture to the robots being developed at universities. As the country readies itself for grand plans and ambitious advancements, the photographer reveals the way that folklore finds itself among the nuts and bolts of futuristic constructions.
Past and present collide also in the work of Kincsõ Bede who interprets the stories passed down to her about communism. Less interested in the symbols from this time, Bede stages scenes and invents her own visual language to communicate the fears, desires, secrets, and paranoia which she inherited.