Ada Zielińska – Some Men Just Want to Watch the World Burn
#3 min Tereza Rudolf, Ada Zielińska
28. 1. 2024
The contemporary tourist is either something of a cynic, a naive consumer of experiences or a constantly fleeing romantic. Ada Zielińska travels through various landscapes for her work, and her photographs contain a certain amount of both romanticism and cynicism. Naivety, in her case, was burnt up before it even approached the artist’s central motif – the automobile. The burning automobile, that is.
In 2013, Ada Zielińska let her first car burn to ashes. She discusses this event as both a terrifying and cathartic experience, which, in any case, sent her out on a long journey lined with flames and water. In 2020, Propaganda, a gallery and publisher, put out a selection of these photographs in the form of an artist’s book, Pyromaniac’s Manual. The artist presents two series of photographs in this publication. One follows older cars burning up in flames, the other presents the artist’s selfies with the wreckage in the background. Moments of fear, astonishment, and a certain contemplative distance thus alternate with insolent and also proud gazes into the camera, which must be perceived as something approaching a parody of this culture. For purely economic reasons, it is older cars that Zielińska sets on fire, which, intended or not, introduces a certain retro-romanticism to the images.
While this series does not manifest an intentional critique of consumerism (perhaps precisely because of the use of older models), the artist does explore this approach in a separate project, Á la car(te), where she brings her lens to the individual components of a thermally treated Citroën. Her most striking project in this regard, however, is Post Tourism (from 2018 onwards). It sees the artist travelling to areas affected by natural catastrophes. Her images of the destruction of human infrastructure and nature are, once again, chillingly beautiful. The artist does not show suffering (in the form of charred animals, people on the run or burning houses) in the way we are accustomed to consuming them via the media, including social media. The images, which sometimes feature a part of a twisted traffic sign or billboard, evidence not only an admiring eye but also a certain cynicism and irony aimed at mass tourism in a time of global climate change. Perhaps the most direct images in this respect are those of the flooded city of Venice only a few months after the biennale opening. In one photograph, a billboard advertising an art exhibition under the title “May You Live In Interesting Times” emerges from a flooded street, while another image shows an exchange office, filled with water at knee height but still operational, with a sign unambiguously displaying the word “Change”.
Image captions
1 | Ada Zielińska, ›Land Desertification‹, from Post Tourism series, 2020
2 | Ada Zielińska, ›Untitled‹, from Post Tourism series, 2018
3 | Ada Zielińska, ›Malibu Driveway‹, from Post Tourism series, 2018
4 | Ada Zielińska, ›Untitled‹, from Post Tourism series, 2018
1-4 | Courtesy of the author
Tereza Rudolf
Ada Zielińska
#4 min Tereza Rudolf
Editor’s Pics by Tereza Rudolf
I’m putting this selection together on my phone. Every now and then, I switch to camera mode and try to photograph my children endlessly tunnelling through the sand beneath a beach umbrella. In much the same straightforward way, I’ve chosen a handful of favourite articles and artist profiles connected to themes of travel, tourism, family photography, and borders of all kinds—not just national ones. Consider this a reading and viewing list for journeys, or perhaps about journeys.
#4 min Tereza Rudolf, Sanaz Sohrabi
Sanaz Sohrabi – Are Images Ever Innocent?
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#2 min Tereza Rudolf
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#4 min Tereza Rudolf, Oreet Ashery
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#1 min Tereza Rudolf
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#1 min Tereza Rudolf
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#1 min Tereza Rudolf