Wiktoria Wojciechowska
The title of Wiktoria Wojciechowska’s photographic series, Sparks, evokes the burning debris of missiles piercing the walls of houses, but also the flashes of explosions reflecting on the faces or the flashes of memory and painful reminiscences that inhabit the spirit of the victims.
Above all, this title refers directly to the form chosen by Wiktoria Wojciechowska to tell the story of the war in Ukraine, a blown up form made up of different collected materials: photographs, films and words, exploded like fragments of bombs. The Sparks series is thus the multidimensional portrait of a war we do not talk about anymore.
At the heart of the series are portraits of young soldiers, Wiktoria Wojciechowska wanted to highlight their lack of experience, fragility and transformation through war. Unprofessional and guided by their sole conviction, these soldiers left their previous social situation to become simple humans in the face of fear, complex feelings and dangers to which they were not prepared. Far from the heroism of these young men, the photographer reveals through her sensitive pictures their flaws and their doubts.
Other images of the series show the ruins left by the fighting, stigmata of a war waged with modern weapons: bridges destroyed, trench dug in a desolate landscape, facades riddled by bullets … Each photograph reflects the positioning chosen by Wiktoria Wojciechowska to give account of the Ukrainian conflict: an angle that is not that of photojournalism but rather that of an oblique vantage point on the war.
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Lucas Olivet
The project Kopiec Bonawentura originates from a quote from Alfred Jarry from Ubu Roi: “As for the action, it happens in Poland, that is to say nowhere.” And if Poland existed in several places at once? Lucas Olivet proposes an imaginary and transnational answer that he locates in Poland and in the lands of exile of its diaspora, commonly called Polonia. This diversity of places draws a mental cartography where the living and intimate details of everyday life can cross the road of the supernatural. For this, Lucas Olivet was guided by a Polish legend, that of Andrzej Tadeusz Bonawentura Kosciuszko. Historians call him “The last knight” or “the first citizen of the world”. His heroic destiny illustrates the common cause of nations subject to the displacement of their borders. The title of the exhibition, Kopiec Bonawentura, is borrowed from the name of the mound built in his memory on the heights of Krakow.
Wiktoria Wojciechowska – Sparks // Lucas Olivet – Kopiec Bonawentura
From September 13 to October 27, 2019
Filature, national scene
20 alley Nathan Katz 68100 Mulhouse
