Aleksandra Cieślewicz The Floor
supervisor:
prof. dr. hab. Piotr Szurek
University of the Arts Poznan
Faculty of Graphic Arts and Visual Communication
Faculty of Graphic Arts and Visual Communication
biography
Aleksandra Cieślewicz graduated from University of the Arts Poznań where she studied old master print, finished her Master’s Degree with distinction and now is starting her PhD.
She creates objects, graphic art and multimedia installations in which she often incorporates video; she also creates drawings, carried out a project in urban space and made performances.
For a year she studied at Muthesius Kunsthochschule in Kiel, Germany.
She took part in many collective exhibitions such as Fama in Świnoujście, Students’ Graphic Art Biennial in Poznań, Rituale und Mysterien in Kiel; film screenings (One Minute Festival, Transformations in Arsenał Municipal Gallery in Poznań among others) and also individual projects (Negativraum in Blackbox in Kiel, Etna in Militello in Val di Catania).
The installation is an analysis of a process which was happening unnoticed for 100 years in one of residential buildings in Poznań. Furniture designs by my grandfather incidentally discovered between floor boards and linoleum registered the traces of history of the family, the flat, Polish design and also political and social conditions which took place in Poland in XX century. Indexical signs pressed onto the paper, for me constitute an extension to traditional graphic methods. Paradoxically it was the floor that took over the role of matrix and steps of people walking on it became a sui generis press. The installation exposing the graphical objects created in this manner was completed with stories narrating the past events from four different perspectives.
