Justyna Wierzchowiecka: Museum Studies (book and exhibition)

In the Museum Studies project Justyna Wierzchowiecka does an original spot-check of issues revolving around the present status of the museum institution and the museum exhibition. Her photographs cast doubt upon the worth of physical, institutional collections in times when the accessibility and advancement of audiovisual online archives and their growing popularity cause us to wonder if the need for physical contact with the objects themselves might gradually vanish.

Wierzchowiecka photographs museum interiors, works, and exhibitions, and the public and staff of institutions, museum bookshops, and gadget stores; she also delves into archival materials. Her technique involves the appropriation, or—to use a term closer to the artist’s intent—the free manipulation of images “out there,” in visual circulation. She subjects them to advanced digital processing, changing shapes and color and shading relationships. She consciously introduces relativity, supplying a pretext for free visual experimentation and formal exploration.

Museum Studies is particularly interesting as an innovative “digital after-effect” museum experience of this artist born in the 1990s. Wierzchowiecka’s project is filled with emotion that comes from a sense of the inadequacy of the museum formula, most often apprehended as a prevailing catalogue of reality. Personal and creative interaction is, for Wierzchowiecka and her generation, a greater source of knowledge of the changing world than the anonymous and passive contemplation of readymade algorithms for understanding museum exhibitions and other matrices of reality. The museum (if this term is indeed still justified) is certainly no longer a place whose didactic mission to accumulate objects in monstrous collections can salvage the dusty heritage of the swiftly receding past.

Curator: Kuba Bąkowski

Book design: Honza Zamojski

Justyna Wierzchowiecka (1991, Koszalin) is a fifth-year student of photography at the La Cambre Visual Arts Academy in Brussels. Her work mainly covers the medium of photography as such, the status of the image in the post-Internet era, and its manipulation. She is a member of the GUSH photography collective.