Anna Orłowska

Born 1986 in Opole (PL), Anna Orłowska studied photography at the National Film, Television and Theater School in Łódź (PL) and at the Institute of Creative Photography at the University of Silesia in Opava (PL); she was awarded the Photo Global scholarship at the School of Visual Arts in New York (US) in 2013. The artist uses photography to reveal hidden layers of history and its ideological conditioning, often absent from official narratives. Blending conventions, like documentary and staging, she exposes myths and legends, deconstructing fantasies about the past, and creating new constellations of meaning. Her photo-based objects test the boundaries of the medium. Orłowska treats photography as an instrument for exploring knowledge itself and for working with memory.

“I never thought of my garden as an artistic practice. Recently, while searching for a way to express the thoughts circulating within me, I began to wonder if the answer had been there all along. My garden. Could it be my medium? Perhaps it has been for some time already. (. . .)”

Taking her research on gardens as a point of departure, during her stay in Graz, the artist is particularly interested in Schloss Eggenberg, whose architecture and gardens are based on a cosmological system, embedding time, planetary order, and seasonal rhythms in a spatial form. Alongside the palace, she is studying the Austrian Open-Air Museum Stübing, where vernacular houses brought together from different regions of Austria raise questions about how architecture embodies local knowledge, everyday practices, and ways of understanding the world, and how these meanings change when buildings are removed from their original contexts and assembled within a museum landscape. Graz, with its layered history and its connection to Johannes Kepler’s intellectual milieu, seems to be a particularly meaningful place to pursue Orłowska’s line of inquiry.