Anna Orłowska – Futeral

15. 2. 2020

ORŁOWSKA, Anna. Futeral. Łódź: Wschód Gallery & The Polish National FilmTelevision and Theatre School in Łódź, 2018. ISBN 978-83-949900-0-8.

Futeral, originally from the German Futteral or casing, is an apt title for this photographic series, which follows selected Polish chateaus. A history that is close enough for us to understand its causes and effects throughout the 20th century. From today’s perspective, many of the customs from aristocratic times are controversial, and the chateaus went through truly bizarre times during post- war totalitarianism. The sediments of every social epoch are often evident even on small details. Anna Orłowska observes everything, placing it into her own casing in the form of this very successful artist book.

Text | Markéta Kinterová

Markéta Kinterová

is the artistic director of Fotograf.zone and the editor-in-chief of the online magazine Fotograf. Her practice focuses on artistic research related to public space. She teaches at the Department of Photography at FAMU, Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague.

Anna Orłowska

is a Polish visual artist and photographer based in Warsaw and Silesia. Her practice uses photography to reveal invisible layers of history and ideology, often absent from official narratives. She plays with conventions ranging from documentary to staging, testing the boundaries of the medium.

#35 living with humans

People reflect themselves through things that surround them. They are part of the animal kingdom, yet they do not include themselves into it. They separate their selves from the whole, and this gradual exclusion of the ego from the general context leads to the dualism of the relationship between the man and nature, not to the idea of the man as its consciously sociable part. In his lecture Too Human World, Philippe Descola states that the society does not own nature, but nature owns us. He speaks of the possibility of granting human rights to all kinds of living and inanimate nature, as do communities and natural peoples living in harmony with the landscape and living creatures. Images of animals have accompanied human culture since the times of cave paintings, but photography seems to be in a more complicated position of a modern technical tool. The keywords photography – of animals primarily evoke spectacular images of wild animals from exotic parts of the world, which do their protagonists disservice in the long run. The ambition of this issue is to suggest a different, non-linear view of the relationship between the man and fauna, trying to reflect its original nature, including the context of the impact of human activity.