Gabriel Orłowski: Hyper

Gabriel Orłowski, Territory #1, from the series Hyper, 2013. © Gabriel Orłowski. Courtesy of the artist

An image does not exist without a surface, nor content without a medium – we discover a scrap of this knowledge by observing reality. Conscious use of pictures has become a sociotechnique, which, like light in a hotel foyer or music in a shopping centre, is supposed to have an effect on the way we feel, put us in a state of comfort, acceptance and empty admiration of everyday things. Use of the medium of photography is optimised, and aims to make the message fully efficient. It promises an idyll and models our needs. Yet the excess and constant updating of content conveyed in the public space has the reverse effect – the information blends into gibberish, and the images into a uniform hum. From behind the façade of the Potemkin village come props from the scenery – scaffolding, drivers, materials and carriers. After stripping the reality from this iconic superstructure, we discover underneath the empty and barren actual space, devoid of stimulants.

Curator: Marta Kołakowska

Gabriel Orłowski (born 1989, Warsaw)

He is a photographer and musician also working with video, and a student and scholarship-recipient at Łódź Film School. He has exhibited his work in Poland and France, and published in various European magazines. He is interested in issues of post-modernity and corporeality, as well as the philosophy and theory of the image.