Rubrieken
1
Krystyna Ziach
Fluid Time
2021-2024
Time, considered metaphorically as a fluid element in perpetual movement, is the starting point for this series. The leitmotif Krystyna Ziach uses is rusty iron, which serves as the metaphorical carrier of the ‘fluidity’ of the flow of time and of transience. This photo series, which is largely based on photographs from Ziach’s earliest youth, has a strongly autobiographical nature. Each photo with its moment frozen in time constitutes a kind of time capsule. The photos used have been removed from their context as carriers of a certain identity. The work is about the vulnerability of human beings and feelings, about transience and isolation. Ziach took a number of photos from her archive as a starting point and multiplied them, as it were ‘endlessly’, to suggest infinity and the perpetuity of time in which the personal seems to disappear.The placement of rusty sheets of iron in front of the faces and images of people, constitutes as it were, a seemingly insurmountable barrier evoked by time. In the series the elapsing of time is emphasized in yet another way: nature in the form of a yellowing weeping willow, a close-up of pores on the back of a human body and a closed curtain, all of them positioned beside rusty sheets of iron. Ziach used photographs of her own face situated between rusty sheets and in one of them water streams down her face, which again underlines the ephemerality of existence. We all have memories – and photos – of our school days which will forever continue to play an important part in our lives. In the series Fluid Time, the rusty sheets of iron seem to make school days forever inaccessible. The decaptych Fluid Time I shows that it is impossible to photograph the same cloudscape several times, because everything remains in perpetual movement. For Krystyna Ziach the series Fluid Time is an imaginary journey through time, a form of personal archeology, a confrontation with the past and a reflection on transience. Opposites such as individual/collective and anonymous/personal play a part in this series as well. On closer consideration, Ziach also tried to visualize the more general, collective store of images and memories, thus creating an interaction between individual and collective memory.
Translation: Hanny Keulers