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The presented photographs by Karol Palka, from his series Edifice, appear simultaneously as documentation of post-soviet interiors and an aestheticization of the effects that time and forgetting had on soviet architecture. His photographs show buildings and interiors that remain as leftovers after the communist regime. For instance, for Edifice the artist portrayed the director’s offices inside the steel plant in Nowa Huta near Cracow, named after Vladimir Lenin, or the interiors of Hotel Polana in Slovakia, which used to serve as a private resort for the communist party members in Czechoslovakia.
Karol Palka’s photographic practice revolves around the political rhetoric of Soviet architecture. His works show the contemporary condition of post-soviet buildings and their interiors, which now appear as ghosts of the once exalted and celebrated eastern European communist governments.
Photo with Plumage (2016) presented in our sale offer, portrays a once luxurious hotel room, now destroyed, empty, and marked with the passage of time. Regardless of those features, however, through Palka’s lens, the scene becomes almost meditative. Even with the damaged furniture, and spilled plumage, the scene does not come across as violent or scary, but rather peaceful and aesthetic.
