A large beige-colored cube cube full of dents has been rammed between two walls of the exhibition architecture, as if hurled by the hand of a giant. Technically, it is a vastly enlarged intact cube of paper that the artist crumpled in one quick, casual movement. She then had the deformed model translated into a precisely constructed cube of 1 mm thick sheet steel. Under her supervision and guidance, she had the cube struck with a heavy metal object until it acquired the exact damaged shape she envisioned. Thus, its accidental appearance has been meticulously constructed, and the aggressive impulse deliberately controlled and frozen. As the simplified shape of a house, the cube – it has a hidden door facing the corner – is a mental space for the artist and as such a metaphor. The damage represents creative destruction, or rather, the experience that ever new combinations of factors keep change in flux. After the wall fell, Sosnowska witnessed the overhaul of socialist architecture in Warsaw. In works of this kind, she addresses obsolete gestures of representation, gestures that burrow into new materials and that, like parasites, continue to exist quite openly or undercover.
Monika Sosnowska (b.1972, Ryki, Poland) destabilizes rooms by erecting site-specific structures in them. She makes models of architectural bodies, damages them, and has them converted into large formats. The artist often chooses to work with craftsmen in Poland who had been specialized in prefabricated building under socialism. Sosnowska lives and works in Warsaw.