From the Toskana series
Łukasz Rusznica
2015
photograph wallpaper
Łukasz Rusznica's photographic installation is displayed in the windows of the vacated Awangarda Gallery building, beyond the exhibition space, but at the same time in the space that serves as a "detached display window" of the new gallery hidden on the mezzanine of the Wrocław Główny railway station. In this context, the selection of shots from the Toskana series is a significant one, as the photographer from Wrocław is a specialist in outsider stories that carry the suggestive potential to create their own, highly erotic mythology. The appropriation strategy appears even in the title of the photographic book, from which we have selected the photographs used in the installation. Toskana is a distorted name the an Italian region, well-known from summer guides. Its capital city, famous for its works of art, is Florence. In the photographs of magnificent interiors filled with works of Italian Renaissance and Baroque we see performing bodies of contemporary anonymous protagonists, frozen in bored poses, fascinated, absorbed in reading the screens of their phones, beautiful and banal. We peep at them as if through the window of a train or on stage. For a fraction of a second they are more visible than the famous images they look at.