The exhibition explores the city as a living organism in permanent transition, with Berlin acting as the starting point for a universal reflection on contemporary urban spaces.

‘The city is a discourse and this discourse is truly a language: the city speaks to its inhabitants; we speak our city, the city where we are, simply by living in it, by wandering through it, by looking at it’, wrote Roland Barthes in 1967. These words take on particular resonance when looking at the photographs of Maciej Markowicz, created using the mobile camera obscura technique.

In the eyes of Maciej Markowicz, reading the city is more about decoding its layers and impressions than documenting it. As he wanders through it, the artist records the way in which a ‘familiarity’ of place can emerge: from sight, sensation and experience. The photographs represent an abstract experience of place and time, the poetics of the post-modern city; they capture a moment of becoming, of movement and change.

Observation in motion – registering the process of transforming cities within the context of the past – inspired the Berlin-born Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin to create his portrait of Paris, a collection of essays titled Passages. His texts are suited to a ‘spatial form’: non-linear and devoid of any governing principle of temporal succession.

One could adopt a similar approach to the images created a hundred years later by Maciej Markowicz using the mobile camera obscura technique. The paper negatives represent an abstract experience of place and time, the poetics of the post-modern city. Given the nature of the artist’s creative process – the images are exposed directly onto sheets of colour photographic paper, resulting in large-format paper negatives – each photograph is one-of-a-kind and constitutes a unique work of art. This is a contemplative record of reflections on the city from the past ten years: the contemporary Berlin Passages.

Exhibition open:
Tuesday–Saturday: 3:00 PM – 7:00 PM
Sunday: 2:00 PM – 6:00 PM