Conceptual nominee

One of the important impulses that drove me to create this photo series was the note made in 2010 by the Australian press journalist Jo Chandler. In her intriguing text she expresses the emotions experienced when visiting the Polish-Soviet polar station in Antarctica (A.B. Dobrowolski Polar Station). Fascinated by the report and the underpinning mystery, I started to create a kind of an archive comprising different materials regarding Polish polar expeditions from the years 1958– 1979. The exhaustive search for information, articles, reports and photographic documentation helped me ascertain the chronology of events and the reasons why the station was abandoned by subsequent expeditions. The suggestive descriptions often bring to mind the legendary expeditions of famous explolers all of whom were also accompanied by artists. A small portion of the White Land gained a new technical representation in the form of a spatial model created using digital tools and a computer-controlled miller. Owing to the miniature reconstruction, I could again encode the image with my own photographic narration. The series entitled “Oasis” is an attempt to externalise my imaginations and reflections referring to a place I have never visited.

Jakub Wawrzak (b. 1989 in Torun, Poland) graduated from the Nicolaus Copernicus University, Department of Fine Arts. In 2014 he started his job as an assistant in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Technology and Life Sciences in Bydgoszcz. In 2017 he got a position as assistant in the Department of Graphic Art at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun. In 2018 he received his PhD degree in fine arts (NCU). In his art-research project he investigates the phenomenon of reception of diorama, with particular emphasis on the phenomenon of immersion and virtual images.