Zofia Kulik
Zofia Kulik (born 1947 in Wrocław, Poland) is a Polish artist living and working in Łomianki (Warsaw),[1] whose art combines political criticism with a feminist perspective.
[1] Their art was highly political and as a response to the rejection of their ideas from both the regime and the Polish neo avant-garde, the duo set up an independent gallery called the Studio of Activities, Documentation and Propagation (PDDiU) in their private apartment in Warsaw.
That was when Kulik began to create monumental, black and white, photographic compositions resulting from the process of multiple exposures of manifold negatives from the artist's archive of images.
Along with this self-justification followed the ornament which served as a way for Kulik to unravel a vision of history, politics and art as a continuum of recurring signs and gestures linked to an individual experience.
Materialised in an archive of images, Kulik implemented about 700 photographs of a naked male model, presented on a black background, striking poses of symbolic gestures taken from ancient Greek vases, catholic iconography as well as Stalinist memorials.
More TV frames can be seen at the top and the bottom of the work, where grey stripes depict an execution in 1941 from a documentary called The Russia We Lost shown by Moscow’s television in 1993.
The sumptuous, ornamented robe she dresses herself in consists of many black-and-white and multiple exposure photographs of her male model and artist friend Zbigniew Libera.
By turning the images of the naked model into her garment and arranging them in such a miniature, geometrical and abstract way, Kulik subordinates the male, which even increases the notion of female authority.
As splendid as her dress appears to be, the crown and royal attributes Kulik decorates herself with are made of lettuce leaves, a cucumber and a dandelion – objects of a rural, daily life.
The complexity of this work comes from the richness of the archive that I possess.”[17] - Zofia Kulik (1998)From Siberia to Cyberia is a monumental photo-mural which returns to the "fluid", open-end form, amenable to being continuously expanded in horizontal sequence.
The monumental grid of identical small black and white frames is made of screen shots of the artist’s TV set, arranged chronologically starting in 1978 and ending in 2004.
Apparently it's a "vibrating visual mass" of undifferentiated small pictures, which lost their specific content in order to become building blocks in an endless carpet – but on a closer inspection, it is possible to view every single photo clearly, revealing a complex web of parallel stories.
