Dating back to the 2000s, when Monika Sosnowska returned to Warsaw from Amsterdam, the artist’s interest in constructivist and modernist architecture began with walks across the city and soon grew into a key study subject in her practice.
Just like modernist architecture itself, the works of Monika Sosnowska can be defined as the “direct speech” of structure and material. Her independent sculptural installations and objects installed across the globe (from Poland to Bangladesh) bear an ability to gradually group together, forming local histories about the persistence of the supranational language of modernism. However, in Sosnowska’s practice, materiality escalates and turns into an excuse to discover a human perspective within the discourse built around major architectural narratives, such as the social and political ones. This is why, in order to examine the artist’s creative method, it is important to constantly address “minor” issues, such as the physicality of an architectural detail, as much as much larger forms, even extending to the landscape surrounding a particular installation.
In conversation at Garage, the renowned architect, author of several public art spaces in London, ETH Zurich professor Tom Emerson and curator of the project Anastasia Mityushina will discuss Monika Sosnowska’s installation Exercises in Construction. Bending, which is the latest Garage Atrium Commission, as well as the artist’s unique language, public and private environments, and the essence of modernism.
Tom Emerson’s second talk in Moscow focusing entirely on his method will be held within the public program organized by the school MARCH at 19:30 on February 3.