Marek Noniewicz "This is not Still Life"

This is not Still Life - a series of photographs realized in 2013-2016.

The presented works are reproductions of 30 x 40 cm enlargements made in the dark room on photographic paper and toned or partially toned.

Magnification was made of black and white negatives of the format 13 x 18 cm.

The inspiration for the work was reading the poems by Thomas Sterns Eliot The West Land(1922) and The Hollow Man (1925), and albumin prints of still life by Charles Hippolyte Aubry, which I had the opportunity to see at the Fine Arts Museum in Boston. To say that in the series This is not Still Life I have criticized contemporary culture and civilization, by visualizing my own feelings about its condition, it is only part of the truth. These are images of hunger for emotions and doubts in the ability to experience them. Awareness of this dissatisfaction becomes a pretext for attempting to purify and creates a space for seeking harmony in building relations between objects - symbols in photographs.

In the area of my activity, I mainly find photography, although now and then I think that I am interested in light sensitivity, both natural and artificial, because it is also difficult to set boundaries. I am convinced that the way of recording reflects the process of thinking about the image and its reception; therefore, more often I reach for historical and experimental techniques, or ephemeral forms of writing. Treating them as a kind of key to the language of nature. I try to revive the myth and try to find a contemporary context for it. Irreversibility and constant transformations of silver processes are somehow synonymous with the changeability of the natural world. What I am trying to register is the course of these changes.

Marek Noniewicz - born in 1971, studied Biology at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. Already during his biological studies, he decided to develop his photographic passion by undertaking studies at Lidova Koncevator in Ostrava, deepening his knowledge by continuing his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań, where he also studied as a technologist in the Department of Photography headed by Professor Stefan Wojnecki. After graduation, he works as a photography instructor at the Youth Palace in Bydgoszcz, then works as an independent instructor, and since 2017 he has been the curator of the Museum of Photography in Bydgoszcz. He is a qualified oligophrenopedagogue teacher. As an artist, he works in various media such as video, performance and photography, in which he often uses historical techniques. He documents spaces of apparent absence, using analog photography to try to find her organic pedigree. He is also a lecturer, author of texts on photography and exhibition curator, he runs his own workshops on photography and photosensitive phenomena.