As part of the Ellas Crean Festival and under the cultural programme prepared for the Polish presidency of the Council of the EU, the Instituto Polaco de Cultura opens this afternoon at 7 pm in the i23 gallery in Madrid (calle Ibiza, 23) the exhibition Enciclopedia, of Polish photographer Weronika Gęsicka.
Over the past decade, visual artist Weronika Gęsicka (1984) has created works and photographic installations that deliberately explore and complicate our perception of visual history, probative knowledge and shared memories. He often works with archival material, and in his latest project, Enciclopedia, has extended his exploration with artificial intelligence tools.
Gęsicka graduated from the Faculty of Graphic Arts of the Academy of Fine Arts and the Warsaw Academy of Photography. He has won numerous awards, including the Polityka Passport 2019 in the Visual Arts category (2020), the EMOP Arendt Award (2019) and Foam Talent (2017). Gęsicka’s works have been shown in exhibitions in Poland and around the world. They are in the collections of the Dom Museum in Vienna, the Arendt Collection in Luxembourg, the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation in Germany and the National Museum in Wrocław, among others.
The encyclopedia is a compendium of knowledge which we consider to be a reliable and credible source of information. A collection of data with which we can confront our doubts. But what happens if a mistake, however small, is taken to something certain and indisputable? Doesn’t this cast doubt on the rest and make it all useless? False entries have existed since the beginning of the history of encyclopedias, dictionaries and lexicons, and functioned, among other things, as protection against plagiarism.
The Enciclopedia exhibition, curated by Katarzyna Sagatowska -from the Jednostka Gallery in Warsaw-, is a project consisting of several hundred false entries found in encyclopedias, dictionaries and lexicons, from different places and different times, illustrated by Weronika Gęsicka using manipulated stock photos and AI-generated images. The real begins to work here on an equal footing with the imaginary. The exhibition will be on display until March 23.
