Praesens II Präsens

Talents 39

Maja Wirkus

In her series Praesens II Präsens, the German-Polish artist Maja Wirkus investigates how the reception of architecture is subjected to an ongoing process of transformation due to changes in private or social necessities, political systems or fashion: both in the public perception and in critical evaluation and individual appropriation. Maja Wirkus’s experiments attest to these shifts – whether in her architecture photography, her usage of archival material or the classification of architectonic fragments and augmentation with objects. She repeatedly inquires into the reciprocal contingencies of photography and architecture. What constituting properties does photography have when – freed from a purely reproductive function – it acts out its interpretative capacity on the object? How does the relationship change when architecture becomes a medium that describes photography? And to what degree are the two linguistic systems dependent on one another?