Tobias Zielony
WATCHING TV IN NARVA
28 Jan - 04 Mar 2023
Tobias Zielony, Untitled (Łódź, Warsaw, Narva), 2023, exhibition view KOW 2023, photo: Ladislav Zajac
Without light we see nothing. Photographers know this better than anyone, as they work with light as such (and with darkness). In Tobias Zielony’s exhibition at KOW, light plays a part in different ways, probing from four angles the question of whether and how light (and darkness) are political today or help shape the social. The show transports us to Asia, Bitterfeld, Poland, and the Baltic countries.
It opens with pictures that Zielony took starting in 2017 (The Fall). In Japan, South Korea, China, Malta, and Germany. They are single shots. What we see are not narratives about specific places, not researches into selected locales—genres familiar from Zielony’s oeuvre—but isolated moments in time, portraits. What do they have in common? Is it a sense of uncertainty shared by the sitters, their anticipation of crises to come? Is it the question whether subcultural youth cultures can still hope to be subversive? Or an inquiry into what remains of the individual photographic image’s power when it is stripped of its complex contexts? Asked how his interactions with his protagonists have changed since he started out in photography twenty years ago, Zielony replies: the picture he creates as a photographer has more and more become the product of a shared visual and imaginative space. His current crop of collaborators are social media natives: acutely aware of the power of the (self-)portrait and conversant with the conditions of its genesis, with the signaling power or ambiguity of gestures, with theatrical formulae, even with the lighting conditions that the self needs and wants for the project of its presentation. For as Brecht wrote, the ones are in the dark, and the others in the light. Seeking exposure, exposing themselves, in order to emerge from the dark: that choice is available to many today.
Next, we see two dozen prints that—intersecting and imbricated—unfurl as a linear reel. The motifs were captured in Poland and Estonia in 2022. The posing and light-dark compositions are reminiscent of The Fall, but the atmosphere seems to have changed. The war next door in Ukraine and the possible threat of a Russian attack, but also the political situation in the models’ own countries leave their mark on the pictures. Individual pictures, here, interweave, form a network, as situations overlap and elements interlock that are perhaps politically and emotionally interrelated, though they do not and cannot tell a single story. The situations, the people, are different. The overall state of affairs, however, is not.
We might call it an apocalyptic farewell to the present that flits through the living room: yet what the screen shows is ordinary everyday life, its reflexes lighting up the young viewers’ faces
The centerpiece of the exhibition is the two-channel video installation Watching TV in Narva, which made its public debut in late 2022 at the Museum Marta Herford. Narva is an Estonian city on the border with Russia. Most of its residents speak Russian, and since the demise of the Soviet Union, many have been officially stateless or held so-called alien passports. To curb the influence of Russian propaganda, the Estonian government shut off the major Russian news stations when Russia launched its war of aggression against Ukraine in the spring of 2022. Zielony recorded his footage in a dark interior. Illuminated only by the erratically flickering light of a television screen, several young people comment on the television program as they zap through the channels. We hear Estonian, Russian, Ukrainian, and English. Scenes from the ongoing war alternate with feature films, series, esoterica, music—and almost everything seems tinged by a climate of violence. We might call it an apocalyptic farewell to the present that flits through the living room: yet what the screen shows is ordinary everyday life, its reflexes lighting up the young viewers’ faces.
In another room, Zielony presents his new project Wolfen (two-channel video installation and glass display case, 2022). It is about a lost dirty icon, and about the distant future. The town of Bitterfeld-Wolfen was home to ORWO-Werke, East Germany’s largest film factory. ORWO’s black-and-white and color films helped define the style of movies and photography throughout the Eastern Bloc. Until the Wall fell. The sprawling plant once employed 15,000 people; now two dozen work here. The rest was liquidated, the factory halls torn down. What is left of the factory manufactures an especially durable archival film designed to preserve analog pictures and digital data in the form of QR codes for over a thousand years. Who, one wonders, will read the information a millennium from now? Extraterrestrials (who speak English)? We see photographs Zielony took on the scene, some on that very long-lasting film. And we read short texts based on Zielony’s conversations with employees who worked in the factory’s darkroom. The plant’s notorious contamination with toxic chemicals, the degrading labor conditions, the dependency on the Soviet Union come up, as do the collapse of the industry and questions of the past and the future, of knowing and ignorance, understanding and incomprehension, light and darkness.
It opens with pictures that Zielony took starting in 2017 (The Fall). In Japan, South Korea, China, Malta, and Germany. They are single shots. What we see are not narratives about specific places, not researches into selected locales—genres familiar from Zielony’s oeuvre—but isolated moments in time, portraits. What do they have in common? Is it a sense of uncertainty shared by the sitters, their anticipation of crises to come? Is it the question whether subcultural youth cultures can still hope to be subversive? Or an inquiry into what remains of the individual photographic image’s power when it is stripped of its complex contexts? Asked how his interactions with his protagonists have changed since he started out in photography twenty years ago, Zielony replies: the picture he creates as a photographer has more and more become the product of a shared visual and imaginative space. His current crop of collaborators are social media natives: acutely aware of the power of the (self-)portrait and conversant with the conditions of its genesis, with the signaling power or ambiguity of gestures, with theatrical formulae, even with the lighting conditions that the self needs and wants for the project of its presentation. For as Brecht wrote, the ones are in the dark, and the others in the light. Seeking exposure, exposing themselves, in order to emerge from the dark: that choice is available to many today.
Next, we see two dozen prints that—intersecting and imbricated—unfurl as a linear reel. The motifs were captured in Poland and Estonia in 2022. The posing and light-dark compositions are reminiscent of The Fall, but the atmosphere seems to have changed. The war next door in Ukraine and the possible threat of a Russian attack, but also the political situation in the models’ own countries leave their mark on the pictures. Individual pictures, here, interweave, form a network, as situations overlap and elements interlock that are perhaps politically and emotionally interrelated, though they do not and cannot tell a single story. The situations, the people, are different. The overall state of affairs, however, is not.
We might call it an apocalyptic farewell to the present that flits through the living room: yet what the screen shows is ordinary everyday life, its reflexes lighting up the young viewers’ faces
The centerpiece of the exhibition is the two-channel video installation Watching TV in Narva, which made its public debut in late 2022 at the Museum Marta Herford. Narva is an Estonian city on the border with Russia. Most of its residents speak Russian, and since the demise of the Soviet Union, many have been officially stateless or held so-called alien passports. To curb the influence of Russian propaganda, the Estonian government shut off the major Russian news stations when Russia launched its war of aggression against Ukraine in the spring of 2022. Zielony recorded his footage in a dark interior. Illuminated only by the erratically flickering light of a television screen, several young people comment on the television program as they zap through the channels. We hear Estonian, Russian, Ukrainian, and English. Scenes from the ongoing war alternate with feature films, series, esoterica, music—and almost everything seems tinged by a climate of violence. We might call it an apocalyptic farewell to the present that flits through the living room: yet what the screen shows is ordinary everyday life, its reflexes lighting up the young viewers’ faces.
In another room, Zielony presents his new project Wolfen (two-channel video installation and glass display case, 2022). It is about a lost dirty icon, and about the distant future. The town of Bitterfeld-Wolfen was home to ORWO-Werke, East Germany’s largest film factory. ORWO’s black-and-white and color films helped define the style of movies and photography throughout the Eastern Bloc. Until the Wall fell. The sprawling plant once employed 15,000 people; now two dozen work here. The rest was liquidated, the factory halls torn down. What is left of the factory manufactures an especially durable archival film designed to preserve analog pictures and digital data in the form of QR codes for over a thousand years. Who, one wonders, will read the information a millennium from now? Extraterrestrials (who speak English)? We see photographs Zielony took on the scene, some on that very long-lasting film. And we read short texts based on Zielony’s conversations with employees who worked in the factory’s darkroom. The plant’s notorious contamination with toxic chemicals, the degrading labor conditions, the dependency on the Soviet Union come up, as do the collapse of the industry and questions of the past and the future, of knowing and ignorance, understanding and incomprehension, light and darkness.