The growing density of infrastructure is pushing trees out of one area after another, and the space in which they exist is often reduced to a small niche among buildings, concrete and glass. The work is a collection of visual impressions of trees encountered in urban space. Each element of the work is the result of searching, associations and reflections on them. The collection was created using various techniques (photography, installation, sculpture), and the individual images illustrate different aspects of the problem. They are united by a monochrome style that reduces real objects to a symbolic role.

I pass trees fenced in, squeezed in, flooded with concrete. Leaning against façades, grown into metal. Branches nestling against windowpanes, roots pushing up pavements. Some trees grow wild on the roofs of blocks of flats, in the recesses of a protruding cornice, on gravestones. Others, within a few years, are impaled on a fence and join those that have been growing with them for years. In Skaryszewski Park many trees are decorated with reflective markers – I look online to understand what is about to happen. On Wiejska Street, boughs locked in metal stocks. I wonder what will happen once their diameter outgrows the size the locksmith allowed for. In some places they hang, dried out on fences, like a hunter's trophies. Small, large, stout, old, young. Great branches lopped off for safety. Boughs artificially straightened. Designated places: "grow here", "reach a size no larger than", "look nice", "don't shed your leaves".

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication with original texts by Krystyna Jędrzejewska Szmek, Jaś Kapela and Łukasz Gniadek: https://paulinamirowska.eu/zredukowane-zin/.

Paulina Mirowska

Visual artist and activist. Born in 1987 in Warsaw. A graduate of the Faculty of Multimedia Communication at the University of the Arts in Poznań, in Photography and in Graphic Design and Visual Communication. She has worked in the Photography Studio at the Faculty of Graphic Arts of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw since 2011.

She takes an active part in independent activities, both group and individual, combining and developing the fields of analogue photography, sculpture, printmaking and self-publishing. Drawing on her knowledge, she engages in social activism, running multidirectional artistic projects. She has co-authored many community events and installations.

She is a member of the collective Grupa JEST, the Pracownia Wschodnia Association and the screen printing studio PHU Sitex.

paulinamirowska.eu

grupajest.blogspot.com

phusitex.blogspot.com