Artist
Karolina Ćwik
Karolina Ćwik is visual artist based in Poland. Her projects are like intimate diaries, in which she documents her experience of being a mother and an artist.
She is a student of the Institute of Creative Photography in Opava (the Czech Republic), winner of the PDN Emerging Photographer, last year's laureate of the Konrad Pustoła's Remembrance Scholarship, winner of the Sputnik Photos Project titled "As you can see". Her works have been published e.g. in The Calvert Journal, Culture.pl, FK magazine.
Let’s build this virus
The family world, enclosed in four walls, in such a special situation as a pandemic, is a beautiful and at the same time a very delicate space. Difficult emotions, important conversations, quarrels and crying, but also great, disarming love, tenderness and mutual care. We built castles, looked at the planets and took care of our senses. Normally, as in regular life, but with more attention and calm... and for this attention and calm I am grateful, and paradoxically I am glad that this sick situation has occurred in our life.
I had to take these photos. I felt that I had to remember this and keep it inside myself, I also felt that as an artist I should react to this exceptional situation somehow. So I showed my home as it was then, what it became! The diary I made during the first lockdown is also a part of this pandemic project: https://vimeo.com/475919817
The diary presents my memories of the pandemic. It is an attempt to visualize my conversations with children, everyday phone calls with my mother, my thoughts and the personal space of our family. Ultimately, the journal turned out to be a psychological therapy that I needed very much at that time
The title of the series cites the words of my son. An attempt to familiarize children with the subject of the virus triggered Dionizy's desire to build a virus from Lego bricks.
Yulia Krivich is a visual artist and activist. She comes from Ukraine, but currently lives in Warsaw. In her works, she refers to her own experiences and touches upon the issues that are important to the identity of Central and Eastern Europe. Photography is one of her forms of artistic activity. Her performative actions, in which she draws attention to the presence of migrants in Poland as well as the historical dependencies and the resulting attitude of the Poles to migrants from the East are also hot-button issues in the Polish media. Through her artistic work, Yulia makes consistent efforts to bring the migrant community into the public debate in Poland and supports their integration.
It’s hard to describe the work of Bartłomiej Talaga in just a few words – he is a multimedia artist, musician, photography book designer and a Film School teacher. He is also an exploratory artist. His projects are interdisciplinary – they combine photography, music, multimedia, site-specific actions. Some of his works are also purely visual adventures based on intuition, but all of them are characterized by deep thought, mindful focus and exceptional artistic sensitivity.
“I will be mindful of the here and now” – this phrase repeats like a mantra on the pages of Karolina Ćwik’s album, which is a part of the Let’s build the virus series. Being here and now is probably the only way to survive a lockdown with two toddlers at home. Among the hundreds of “pandemic” projects, Karolina’s photos have a unique dose of emotion in them. There is chaos, fatigue, but most of all tenderness bordering on madness, just like in her previous motherhood project.
Maxim Sarychau is a visual artist and photojournalist from Belarus. In his long-term projects and his work as a reporter, he portrays the violence prevailing in authoritarian systems. He returns to hidden stories and gives voice to the victims. He refers to the history of Eastern Europe, but also documents contemporary events in Belarus, including the peaceful protests that took place in the summer and autumn of 2020 in Minsk after the fraudulent presidential election.
Milena Soporowska works in the field of visual arts and art history. In her artistic and research work, she deals with the interpenetration of esotericism with everyday life and the borders between the sacred and the profane. Each of her subsequent projects is a new chapter in this consistently constructed narrative. Based on detailed research, the author refers to the history of spiritualist movements, but at the same time takes up threads of contemporary spirituality.