Monika Sosnowska: Regional Modernities

Overview

A tall hunk of steel that appears to float at the back of the vast gallery space greets you as you enter Regional Modernities. Like all of Monika Sosnowska’s work Facade is as much about the space around it as the actual object. This complex mash of steel window frames twists and bends, changing its form as you get closer and walk around it.

Sosnowska is a Polish artist who creates large-scale industrial sculptures specially designed for the gallery spaces they inhabit. Regional Modernities is her first major exhibition in the Southern Hemisphere. It’s great to see such a big name in international art at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne.

Sosnowska takes recognisable, functional elements of architecture and manipulates them to make them compelling, unusual and sometimes uncomfortable. Wall is a tiny concrete room, half painted in off-green with tiny enclaves, while Corridor is a very thin passage of doors facing each other. They are rough, uncanny and made me slightly claustrophobic.

Her art is meant to be an exploration of post-Communist Poland, and the materials and colour palette she uses immediately evoke the old public architecture that ex-Soviet states are now trying to move away from. The works are also deeply personal, exploring the Poland she lived in as a child and what life’s like there today. The installations are raw and brutal but have important subtle features — doors slightly ajar, crumbling concrete, the play of shadows, and the diffused reflection of Facade on the concrete floor.

For me Regional Modernities raises questions about how architecture intersects with our lives, sometimes working to alienate and confine us. It’s fitting then that to get to ACCA you have to walk through Southbank, which is full of the visually complex and sometimes hideous new towers that are changing the face of Melbourne. The steel and concrete Sosnowska uses in her art is the same stuff that’s constantly rebuilding our city skyline.

The presence of Sosnowska’s work in the sparse ACCA exhibition space gives a visceral, intimate experience comparable to the work of great installation artists like Ai Weiwei. You should go, and take your time, maybe get a coffee and go through a second time, exploring different angles and viewpoints. Like everything at ACCA, there’s a bit of a reverse-TARDIS effect: the gallery seems big from the outside and smaller once inside. But it’s a great exhibition from an exciting artist, and it may leave you wondering how the buildings around us shape how we think and act.