inside / outside

Inside/outside is a series presenting the landscapes and the images of the interiors. Almost pictorial photos, surreal and unusual, intriguing and delightful. Filip Ćwik presents the effects of flood. Outside – on the outside, quite gloomy and chaotic landscapes. We see the surroundings of farms and houses, wickets, trees in a garden, fences, if there are any left. The heartbreaking, ravaged landscape, yet wonderful and transformed. Inside – colorful images of rooms and chambers. Digested by water, permeated with damp. Greatly destroyed. Unique and unusual arrangements of furniture telling about ineffective attempts to save the belongings. Heaps of equipment, broken and wrecked objects in picturesque arrangements, in a feast of color. As if on the canvas. The series is double, inside and outside, monochrome and color. Everything in the photo series has its order and division. Clear logic and simplicity. Everything is reversed in the pictures. The ruin, element, tangling and breaking. Ćwik photographically organizes the found spaces. It allows us to get closer, to come in, it is easier and a bit simpler. Traces of violent, impetuous events. They sink into oblivion after the renovation. Oblivion of only those who did not see and did not live through it. The owners of the photographed spaces will keep these images in their memory till the end of their lives. No renovation will erase them. A photography that records what there is, in a natural way supports the memory. Even if the memory is doing great and the pictures taken from it could not be removed. Therefore, it supports the viewer's imagination. These are not the inventory pictures: there it was, it happened here. Ćwik, apart from confirming the facts, finds views and arrangements, which in a perverse way feast an eye of a viewer. We will not admit it aloud that we like these pictures. We shouldn't. As they show the enormousness of damage, thereby the suffering. As the enormousness of a disaster should not be visually attractive. Putting aside inborn need for compassion, and most of all superficial need for indignation by such a view, we may discover the duality and contradiction. The ambivalence. The beauty and damage. Maybe these images are to stay in us, the viewers, forever. 
Joanna Kinowska