Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

I created this work for Wola Museum in Warsaw. I was inspired by anonymous documentary photograph probably from 50` that puzzled me as very contemporary and unbelievably well staged as for a snapshot. I was thinking a lot about how language of “reality” changes over time and how it can be easily influenced reinterpreted. And then I relied that reenactments are very bodily reinterpretation of images, that they make individual bodies to be mediums of transformation meanings; and I realised that their growing popularity and superficial innocence frightens me. I decided to reenact this photograph I came across and asked members of historical re-enactment groups to do it. Later I also wrote accompanying essay in which I have put into words my interest in language of documentary in contemporary art

Grzegorz Stefanski, born in 1983 in Czluchow (PL), lives and works in Warsaw and London where he is currently an artist in residence at Sarabande Foundation. Before attending art school, he earned master’s degree in philosophy and made his artistic debut in with solo exhibition during Cracow Photomonth Festival in 2010. He concluded his artistic education at The Slade School of Fine Art in London and Miroslaw Balka’s Studio of Spatial Activities in Warsaw. In 2017 he won the Ivan Juritz Prize in London and the Grand Prix at the Biennale of Young Art in Poland. He has exhibited his works at the Whitechapel Gallery in London (2018), Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2018), Ujazdowski Castle Centre of Contemporary Art (2018), Manifesta 11 in Zurich (2016), Pastificio Cerere Foundation in Rome (2014) and the NY Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1 in New York (2010). He has collaborated, among others, with Nowy Teatr in Warsaw (2016), National Museum in Warsaw (2017), and Bunkier Sztuki Gallery of Contemporary Art in Cracow (2018).