Untitled - Fotofestiwal

born: 1975, Geneva
lives in Warsaw
www.grospierre.art.pl
Graduate of the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (1994-1998) and the London School of Economics (19981999), where he studied Sociology and Political Sciences. He made his debut as a photographer in 2001, with
an exhibition entitled Flight 00 (Lot 00) in cafe Szpilka, Warsaw. A conceptual and documentary photographer,
he consistently makes a record of disappearing socialist modernist architecture. In his conceptual works, his
interest in the representation of intellectual games and ideas is clearly visible. He cooperates with the Raster
Gallery and the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw.
selected individual exhibitions:
2007 2006 2005 2003 The Mausoleum, with Olga Mokrzycka, Raster Gallery, Warsaw, Poland
Library, Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland
Hydroklinika, Polish Architects Association Pavilion, Warsaw, Poland
Portraying Communities: Podgorze, Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland
Lithuanian Bus Stops, Academia Theatre, Warsaw, Poland; Rebell Minds Gallery, Berlin, Germany
Portraying Communities: Kamionka, Academia Theatre, Warsaw, Poland
selected group exhibitions:
2007 2006 2004 2003 2002 Concrete Legacy, Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland
The Memory of this Moment from the Distance of Years, Schindler Factory, Cracow, Poland
Antiphotographies, Arsenal Gallery, Poznan, Poland
The New Documentalists, Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland;
Month of Photography in Bratislava, Slovakia
Young Polish Art, Polish Embassy in Tokyo, Japan
Die Nacht ist meine Welt, Rebell Minds Gallery, Berlin, Germany
BRONorblin, Norblin Museum, Warsaw, Poland
2B. Portrait Structures, Norblin Museum, Warsaw, Poland
Neighbours for Neighbours, Academia Theatre, Warsaw, Poland
Block-Neighbourhood-Apartment, Raster Gallery, Warsaw, Poland
Nicolas Grospierre was born in Switzerland and is a French citizen of Polish origin. He grew up in France but
moved to Poland in 1999, where he currently lives and works. His artistic development has been influenced
by the fact that he graduated from the London School of Economics and that his education was generally
oriented towards social and political sciences rather than arts. Grospierre’s social inclination is reflected in
his early works, such as Portraying Communities: Kamionka (Portrety spolecznosci: Kamionka) (2003) or
Portraying Communities: Podgorze (Portrety spolecznosci: Podgorze) (2004). The former project deals with
a utopian community of refugees, whose determination to make the context of their existence closer to
nature stems from being a product of the big city’s hustle and bustle. The latter project is based on the
lives of incarcerated individuals and their guards. Two communities – open and closed, two kinds of bonds
– voluntary and forced, social utopia and dystopia have been preserved in the photographs. Both projects
– though of different sizes – originate in a grand tradition of social photography projects, represented by
August Sander in a global context, and by Zofia Rydet1 in her Sociological Record (Zapis socjologiczny)
in Poland. Grospierre transformed this tradition according to his intuition. For instance, he let his models
arrange the frame or decide with whom and with what background they wanted to be photographed.
In his later photo series, Grospierre diverts his attention from the forms of social organization to architecture
as a context for human existence. The exploration of architectural motifs has its own special dynamics. He
began by simply walking with a camera during his high school studies. This allowed him to create a quasiamateur album of photo impressions. The next step Grospierre made was systematic documentation of the
façade of buildings and arranging them in meaningful lines in Inzynierska Street (Inzynierska), 2002 and
Coloroblocks (Kolorobloki), 2006. Typological collections concretized in e.g. Lithuanian Bus Stops (Litewskie
przystanki autobusowe), 2003-2004 already show the nerve, sensitivity, and the way of thinking of a mature
documentalist. Once we study the forms captured by the artist, we notice his interest in modernist socialist
architecture. For someone from the outside it may seem that modernism, with its particular aesthetics
and architecture, manifested its presence in the former Soviet Union and the countries under its influence
in a very unusual and surprising way. It is fully visible in projects such as: Visaginas, Grospierre and Olga
Mokrzycka2, (2003), Hydroklinika, Grospierre (2004) and Artek, Grospierre (2005). Here, Grospierre deepens
his photographic way of perceiving things, by fully exploring complex architectural projects, from the façade
to the interior. The artist also seems to be interested in a certain vivisection of buildings as forms expressing
the ideology of the former system. Grospierre preserves the last moment of existence of these buildings,
at the same time avoiding unnecessary nostalgia. This is an elementary step for documentary photography
after Charles Marville and Eugene Atget. The Hydroclinic was a famous health spa at the Druskininkai resort
in Lithuania during the Soviet Union. It was demolished the following year for economic, not ideological
reasons. Numerous milk bars – cheap canteens that used to be very important in the socialist economy – are
disappearing in a similar way to make room for restaurants for the middle class or global chain fast food bars
for less wealthy customers: Milk Bars (Bary mleczne), 2004.
02 / 03
Further work on documentary projects pushed Grospierre to an attempt at visualizing not a building itself,
concrete in its architectural form and material aspect, but the very idea of it. A good example of such
conceptual work can be found in The Library (Biblioteka), 20063, which makes use of photography, video
and numerous objects. Everything is carefully composed into one site-specific installation. It was presented
in an unusual and very poetic place – a second-hand bookshop called the Palace of Ancient Books, situated
in Warsaw’s Wola district. This Borgesian maze consisting of hundreds of thousands of volumes was closed
approximately one year after Grospierre’s installation of The Library. Again, the artist’s haste proved to pay
off. This work was a turning point in Grospierre’s artistic development.
Nicolas Grospierre scrutinizes the idea of a library not only as a universal archive where the texts of all times
and disciplines intermingle, but, most importantly, as the space of an infinite imaginative book collection4. By
changing the focus of his attention from the surrounding reality to the phantom library, the artist attempts
to summarize his activity in the field of modern art. The project of documenting the changing world is spread
in time and it is far from romantic heroism. Therefore, it requires even greater attention of critics and
historians. Grospierre’s library crosses the level of a simple, yet impressive documentation proposed by e.g.
Candida Höfer. It fits in a series of book collections conceptualized in modern art. In order to learn about the
potential of this subject, one should remember Martha Rosler Library5. It refers to Robert Smithson’s entropic
collection of books, mostly by the masters of modernism, with the commentary by Alexander Alberro6.
Donald Judd’s7 inspiring library in Marfa, USA is also very significant here. The artists undertaking the subject
of a library do not resemble Romantics, whose existence is defined by reading. Neither are they like librarians
and lay cabalists, who believe that the world is a book that can be read. The interest in books and archives
of all forms can be associated with an analytical impulse that leads them to certain reflections on the ways of
creating knowledge, and gathering and ordering information.
In his later projects, among others in The Mausoleum (Mauzoleum), also created in cooperation with Olga
Mokrzycka in 2007, Grospierre returns to his interest in the communist past of the region. The Mausoleum
presents the collection of peculiar souvenirs and stuffed trophies that the artist spotted during one of his
journeys to Tibilisi, the capital of Georgia (former republic of the Soviet Union). Fetishes collected by Nugzara
Dzanaszia, a retired hunting enthusiast, bring to mind a formalin-wafting relic of a realized Utopia. The
Mausoleum, first presented in The Palace of Culture and Science8 in Warsaw, where party dignitaries used
to receive honours from workers parading on May Day, referred to the fact that this Palace is a symbol of
Soviet dominance. The Mausoleum can therefore be treated as a poetic farewell and a reconciliation with the
past, but it can be viewed in a wider context as well. Dorota Jarecka, a journalist of Gazeta Wyborcza (the
most popular newspaper in Poland) noticed in her review of the exhibition: When I am here, I think about
something more than just the lot of Soviet hunters and their preys. The Mausoleum is also the first museum,
the oldest memorial. The Mausoleum is another, after The Library, attempt at facing the idea of the buildinginstitution, this time the Museum.
Grospierre’s recent projects prove his genuine interest in the socialist modernist architecture known for
multiple blocks of flats constructed from prefabricated elements. Instead of pure documentary photography
of these blocks, Grospierre has focused on the aesthetics of the modernist truss, and he presented
a huge photography project composed of small modules, entitled W-70. This time the artist decided
to play with the illusion of three-dimensionality. The ideal photographic block watched from a certain
angle seemed to be real. The picture was presented in the exhibition entitled Concrete Legacy. From
Le Corbusier to the Homeboys9 (Betonowe dziedzictwo. Od Le Corbusiera do blokersow) in the Centre
for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw in 2007. Other works that dealt with a subject
similar to the artist’s interest10 were also presented at the Castle. The overpowering optical illusion
of Grospierre’s work revealed, to some extent, the phantasm of an ideal society that functioned in
Utopian Communism, and lived in Corbusierian machines-to-live-in.
Adam Mazur
Rydet. Sociological Record (Zapis socjologiczny). 1978-1990, mostly published in: Zofia Rydet
(1911-1997). Photographs [Zofia Rydet (1911-1997). Fotografie], Museum of Art in Lodz, 1999. (red.)
2 Olga Mokrzycka (1976) – graduated from Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. Specializes in scenography,
painting and photography.
3 Project realized in cooperation with The National Library and The Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski
Castle in Warsaw. Nicolas Grospierre, The Library and other projects (Nicolas Grospierre, Biblioteka i inne
projekty). Warsaw: Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, 2006.
4 Compare: Michel Foucault. Dits et écrits 1954-1988. Paris: Gallimard, 2001 (Powiedziane, napisane.
Szalenstwo i literatura, Warsaw, 1999, p. 101).
5 Martha Rosler Library in her apartment at 53 Ludlow Street in New York, available for the audience
from 15 November 2005 to 15 April 2006. See details: www.e-flux.com; www.martharosler.net
6 Compare: A. Alberro. The Catalogue of Robert Smithson’s Library, in: Robert Smithson (exhib. cat.),
Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Sept-November 2004, pp. 245-248.
7 The library in Donald Judd’s estate in Marfa comprises over 10 000 books collected by the artist. See
details: www.juddfoundation.org
8 The Palace of Culture and Science – built in 1955 as “a gift of the Soviet nation for the Polish
nation”. It was named after Joseph Stalin and used to be the symbol of enslavement and Soviet
domination in Poland. Nowadays, it is the seat of many companies and public institutions, e.g. cinemas,
theatres, bookshops, colleges and scientific institutions, and the place of many exhibitions, fairs and
conferences.
9 Homeboys (Polish: blokersi) – youth subculture that originated in large city estates of blocks, often
associated with hip hop, graffiti and break-dance.
10 Concrete Legacy. From Le Corbusier to the Homeboys (Betonowe dziedzictwo. Od Le Corbusiera do
blokersow). curators: Ewa Gorzadek and Stach Szablowski, Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski
Castle, 29.06-7.10.2007, www.csw.art.pl/ns/2007/beton
1 Zofia
04 / 05
hydroklinika/2004
The Hydroclinic was situated in the spa town of Druskininkai, in Lithuania. Designed by A. and R. Silinskas
and built between 1976 and 1981, it used to serve as a balneological hospital, i.e. where patients are treated
with thermal waters. During the socialist era, Druskininkai was one of the former Soviet Union’s most popular
spa towns, and the Hydroclinic was its largest treatment centre. With its 50 healing rooms, 80 thermal baths,
40 mud baths and an underground pool, the centre could host as many as 500 patients at once.
With the collapse of the USSR, the number of patients fell dramatically and the hospital was shut down at the
end of the 1990s. It remained unused for a few years until it was destroyed in 2005, to be replaced by
a modern aqua park, certainly economically more adapted to Lithuania’s needs.
The Hydroklinika project is an attempt at documenting the balneological hospital through a global, objective
and systematic approach. Therefore, no part of the building, be it interior or exterior, was neglected and all
were uniformly photographed. It is for this reason that a great number of photographs are similar to each
other. Indeed, as the hospital was built on a ternary plan, each element is repeated by a multiple of 3.
06 / 07
08 / 09
10 / 11
14 / 15
16 / 17
18 / 19
20 / 21
22 / 23
THELIBRARY/2006
The Library is limitless and periodic.
Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel
The Library (Biblioteka) project is not the representation of a particular library, but rather an attempt at
showing what the essence of a library is. If one assumes that a library has three main functions, that is to
gather books, to stock them and archive them, and to make them available to the public, it is possible to
phrase the following statements.
First, as a library is, by nature, a place where books are gathered, it is potentially infinite, because books, and
thus knowledge, know no boundaries and are constantly expanding. And second, a library may contain a book
on libraries, or even the list of all books in that particular library, which means that a library is simultaneously
the container and the content of the same subject matter.
The Library is a photographic installation developed upon the above-mentioned propositions. In its simplest
form, the installation is composed of six elements (photographic objects and installations) laid down in
a circle. These elements are the following:
1) A fake book, i.e. a photographic object imitating one of the books of the library, life size;
2) A fake bookshelf, i.e. a photographic object imitating one of the bookshelves of the library, life size;
3) A wall of books, i.e. a photograph of a bookshelf placed in a light box and shown in mirrors, in order to
create the illusion of a wall spreading endlessly in all directions;
4) A corridor of books, i.e. two photographs of bookshelves placed in light boxes and shown in mirrors, in
order to create the illusion of a corridor sprawling endlessly;
5) The library building i.e. a light box representing a miniature library;
6) A real book, which is the alter ego of the fake book, where one can find a photograph of the miniature
library building.
In this setting, watching the installation is like a backward tracking, starting from a book, where each
additional step backward places the viewer in a higher position, and ending where it has started.
Never-ending corridor
Never-ending corridor
Installation view at the Palace of Ancient
Books, Warsaw, Oct. 2006
26 / 27
Kaleidoscope
Installation view at the Palace of Ancient
Books, Warsaw, Oct. 2006
Fake Bookshelf
Installation view at the Palace of Ancient
Books, Warsaw, Oct. 2006.
28 / 29
Library Building
Installation view at the Palace of Ancient
Books, Warsaw, Oct. 2006
Fake book hidden among real books
Installation view at the Palace of Ancient
Books, Warsaw, Oct. 2006
30 / 31
TheMAUSOLEUM/2007
Below Tbilisi’s central square, built in the 1970’s, lies an unusual architectural complex: a three-floor
underground recreational and cultural centre. It is today, to a large extent, derelict and devastated, and
is a relict of soviet architecture. The only “living” space in this whole complex is the Animal World: an
extraordinary collection of 500 stuffed animals, which constitute the private collection of one man, Nugzar
Dzanishia. All the animals were shot and stuffed by Dzanishia himself, and then arranged as a permanent
exhibition on the lowest underground level of the concrete complex. Dzanishia was a prominent soviet figure
and used to hunt with the local soviet apparatchiks who supported his passion by lending him the venue that
became the Animal World.
In 2006, Olga Mokrzycka and Nicolas Grospierre stood by the gates of the Animal World. Their encounter with
the creator of the collection its obsessive character led them to making a photographic documentation of
Dzanishia’s museum. This documentation was the basis upon which the Mausoleum (Mauzoleum) project was
created, in another venue, similarly marked by History: the underground club of the Tribune of the Palace of
Culture in Warsaw, where the Communist dignitaries used to assist at the military parades on May 1st.
The 15 metre-long frieze, representing the meticulously arranged collection of animals, takes us not only to
another place, but also back in time. It is a reference to the tradition of the Wunderkammer – private cabinets
of curiosities – but also to the not-so-distant time when propaganda kept hidden what was happening in real
life. In this way the stuffed animals, placed in the socialist-realist interiors of the Palace, are relics of a past
which, not without reason, is currently being buried. The mummified animals are thus not only
a remembrance of extravagant hunting parties and an obsessive hunter’s passion, but they remind us also of
the once “only rightful” mummies, exposed below the Mausoleum of the Red Square in Moscow.
Łukasz Gorczyca
Installation view at the Palace of
Culture, Warsaw, May 2006
32 / 33
Frieze
(fragment)
34 / 35
Frieze
(fragment)
36 / 37
Real stuffed deer
Installation view at the Palace of
Culture, Warsaw, May 2006
Installation view at the Palace of
Culture, Warsaw, May 2006
38 / 39
w-70/2007
The W-70 project consists of several photographic models that deal with, among other things, the question of
modularity in modern architecture. The name W-70 comes from the most common prefabricated multi-storey
home system in Poland, designed in the 1970’s.
The context of the W-70 project was the Concrete Legacy exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Art
in Warsaw in June 2007, which “focused on concrete block housing as one of the gravest consequences of
Modernist architectural thought”, and its embodiment in Poland.
The first step of the W-70 project involved photographing approximately 4000 different elements of this
system (walls, balconies, windows, etc), in order to be able to re-assemble them later at will. Using the
photographed prefabricated modules as “raw material”, the second step of the W-70 project was creating
visual and spatial situations where the viewer could appreciate the concrete blocks of flats from different
perspectives (literally and metaphorically).
Grospierre has indeed been fascinated for many years by concrete tower blocks and in this project he wanted
to convey this fascination and oppose the common opinion that blocks are “ugly and alienating”. Either by using
some visual properties of perspective (as a reference to the tradition which lead to the Modernist school of
architecture), or confronting the viewer with unusual architectural situations, he has conceived pieces that
would amuse and intrigue the viewer, and maybe make him look at modern concrete block houses differently.
Zory
Installation view at the CCA
in Warsaw, June 2007
40 / 41
42 / 43
Prefabricated elements later used in the project as
construction elements in the photographic montages.
3D –> 2D
Installation view at the CCA
in Warsaw, June 2007
3D –> 2D
Photographic montage
44 / 45
Zory
Photographic montage
photopoland
PhotoPoland is a project that aims to promote modern Polish photography abroad. It has been developed
by Adam Mickiewicz Institute and Foundation of Visual Education, the main organizer of Fotofestiwal, in
cooperation with an international group of curators. Its first edition was organized in May 2007. Representatives of various festivals and institutions dealing with photography from Spain, Brazil, USA, Mexico, Russia,
Greece, Israel and Great Britain met during the International Festival of Photography in Lodz. They spent
two days analyzing portfolios and talking to 15 Polish artists. The outcome of these meetings is a series of
exhibitions of 7 of these photographers – Nicolas Grospierre, Przemysław Pokrycki, Konrad Pustoła, Szymon
Rogiński, Asia Zastróżna, and the duo of Weronika Łodzińska and Andrzej Kramarz – presented in galleries and
exhibitions all around the world.
Curators
Naomi Aviv (freelance curator, Israel); Stephanie Brown (Photographers’ Gallery, London, UK); Alejandro
Castellanos (Centro de la Imagen, Mexico); Karla Osorio Netto (Foto Arte Brasilia, Brasil); Lambros Papanikolatos
(freelance curator, Greece); Nissan Perez (Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Israel); Irina Tchmyreva (Museum of
Modern Art in Moscow, Russia); Victoria del Val (La Fabrica, Madrid, Spain); Wendy Watris (FotoFest, Huston, USA)
Coordinators
Hanna Kaniasta – project coordinator for Adam Mickiewicz Institute, Visual Art Section
Małgorzata Żmijska – project coordinator for Foundation of Visual Education
Consultants
Joanna Studzińska, Krzysztof Candrowicz, Adam Mazur
Marta Szymańska – edition; konradolczak.pl – graphic design; translateria.pl – translation and proofreading;
Krzysztof Kościuczuk – proofreading
www.photopoland.com.pl // www.iam.pl // www.lodzartcenter.com // www.fotofestiwal.com
© Foundation of Visual Education & Adam Mickiewicz Institute
The album was published as part of PhotoPoland project organized by Adam Mickiewicz Institute
and Foundation of Visual Education.
ISBN 978-83-60794-54-8
ISBN 978-83-60263-60-4