Artist
Monika Orpik
Monika Orpik (b. 1997) is a visual artist from Poland, based in Hamburg. She holds a BA in Photography from London College of Communication, and is currently pursuing an MA in Photography at Hamburg’s Hochschule für bildende Künste. Approaching questions of reconciliation and dialogue in post-traumatic societies, her practice is research based, making use of archival materials, interviews, oral histories and artefacts. Her methodology involves working with specialists across various disciplines, including ethnography, anthropology, film and music. Since March 2022, Orpik has been a member of ABC (Artists’ Book Cooperative).
Website: monikaorpik.com
Stepping Out Into This Almost Empty Road
Stepping Out Into This Almost Empty Road looks at the moment of change when an idyllic scenario is transformed by the horror of a political regime; from picking apples in the orchard to tear gas on the street. The project combines photographic material and texts that revolve around an in-between state that’s inseparable from migration. What happens when you’re forced to leave something behind and start anew elsewhere? What tools do you use to visualise loss and the absence? How do you build an identity when the dialect you speak is rejected as a language? Though focused on stories from a specific community, the project highlights the universal elements of transition.
Aware of the discrepancies of representation within the political apparatus of photography – of who is looking and who is being looked at – Orpik works on the basis of invitation rather than stepping into spaces where she doesn’t belong. The encounter itself is more important than its outcome, and the community she portrays was depicted in the way it wanted to be – leaving their traces only in text, or in the photographed objects and landscapes that surround them on a daily basis. Stepping Out Into This Almost Empty Road became a reflection on what constitutes a neighbourhood, the experience of migration, and how diversity can bring people together.
In Monika Orpik's work titled Stepping Out Into This Almost Empty Road, we are invited to engage with migration and transience with her stark black-and-white photographs that document various states of impermanence along the Polish-Belarus border. The Białowieża National Forest is the center of Orpik’s meditation on life at a time of political oppression and transformation.
Peter Pflügler’s work Now is not the right time equally begins with a forest and a deep desire to use photography as a means to investigate and render previously hidden secrets visible. Strikingly coherent and honest in his approach, Pflügler’s work intimately instigates a conversation about suicide, secrecy, and the suddenness of time’s ongoing passing.
Raisan Hameed focuses on the materiality of images in his work, Zer-Störung which, as the name suggests, looks at the processes of destruction, and what remains are documents formed by various layers of time as open questions and scars. Starting with the combination of personal and archival imagery from his hometown Mosul, Hammed’s work engages with the photograph’s power to obscure time and meaning.
Bärbel Reinhardt’s work draws from photographic stratification. Working across various modes of presentation, Reinhardt’s work plays with the imaginary quality of the photograph, looking at the contemporary cut-and-paste visual queues as signposts for a recyclable iconography. In her project, again still erratics perhaps, the artist gathers, deconstructs, cuts, assembles, photographs, re-photographs, and repurposes these to create a dense visual space where different times and techniques collaborate.
In artist and author Marie Hervé’s work, history is both completed and open-ended – her tendency to work with a combination of archival and personal imagery anchors her narratives into past, present, and future. Her project The island on the island is a meditation on the Mediterranean territory’s beauty and transience. The act of researching and retracing the past, becomes a means through which to engage with the unstable nature of the present.