“(…) my fascination with construction sites lays within this temporary but constantly shifting sculptural aspects and those parts of
a building which will never be seen again after finishing. It’s like
an operation on an open heart, a surgical insight into the giant body of architecture, bones and flesh and veins and all the life-support around it, machines, material, euro-paletts, sometimes just rubble and dirt of completed steps in the process, a reversed archeology of the temples of our time, in which space is the highest value of all,
a commodity which eats shores and pushes away everything what
is related to a good life, like a hungry monster (…)”
– Zuzanna Czebatul
Zuzanna Czebatul (born in 1986, Poland) lives and works in Berlin. She graduated from the Städelschule Frankfurt in 2013, and later attended the MFA Program at Hunter College, New York as Fulbright Fellow.
Czebatul works primarily within the realm of sculpture and installation. Her interests revolve around relations of production, power structures and repressive social apparatuses. Through humour and playful strategies, Czebatul blurs the line between symbolic architecture, monument, relic, fetish and commodity to question the boundary between reality and artificiality.
BAUSTELLE at Import Export takes as its departure point giant construction sites. Holes in the ground, empty niches that used to nest buildings, rubble, and skeletons of supporting constructions - they all function as performative sculptures or anti-sculptures within the urban sphere. They are evidence to the restructuring and redevelopment of cities, often motivated by corporate investments and monetary gains of real-estate developers. By overriding the principles of social functionality, they allow for the logic of capitalism to enter the organic fabric of the city and harmfully impact the lives of its inhabitants. Czebatul explains:
"(…) my fascination for construction sites lays within this temporary but constantly shifting sculptural aspects and those parts of a building which will never be seen again after finishing. It's like an operation on an open heart, a surgical insight into the giant body of architecture, bones and flesh and veins and all the life-support around it, machines, material, euro-paletts, sometimes just rubble and dirt of completed steps in the process, a reversed archeology of the temples of our time, in which space is the highest value of all, a commodity which eats shores and pushes away everything what is related to a good life, like a hungry monster (…)"
BAUSTELLE brings together a commissioned spatial installation, a new series of sculptures as well as photographs taken in Warsaw, New York, Geneva and Berlin.
