Manhunt

In creating Manhunt, a video installation in line with the catastrophic/apocalyptic trend popular in today’s art, Piotr Wyrzykowski did not have to resort to using images arising from his imagination. He found appropriate scenes in the Soviet architecture of Kyiv’s subway system. He recorded its stations and corridors at night when only artificial light occupied the unpopulated spaces. The interiors are devoid of their basic transportational function, while the architecture’s severity and monumentality, going hand in hand with the cold pragmatism of infrastructure, compound the feeling of emptiness and claustrophobia. Other uses for the subway tunnels come to mind, such as serving as shelters in the event of a cataclysm or war.

The lightboxes found in Kolekcja II were part of an installation reflecting the convention of science fiction films and dystopian stories of a post-apocalyptic world. Crafting his highly-suggestive and horrific scenes, Wyrzykowski employed various elements borrowed from pop culture. The complex installation is centred on a wall covered with reliefs evocative of the work of Hans Rudolf Giger – the creator of the memorable graphic identity of the film Alien (dir. Ridley Scott, 1979) – and embedded with cases and video projections showing scenes from the deserted subway system. The whole structure is supplemented with quotations from Serhiy Zhadan’s book Anarchy in the UKR (Ukrainian ed. 2005) on the subway as a living space capable of absorbing people’s thoughts, shadows and voices.

Viewers looking at Wyrzykowski’s work have only their own best guesses to guide them. The artist leaves no clues as to whether the abandoned interiors we see are shelters to be inhabited during a catastrophe or part of a new post-apocalyptic reality. They exude an atmosphere similar to that of the numerous literary visions of worlds populated by survivors. At the basis of many such tales are the cold war and the clash of empires. The artist makes thorough use of political realities in another of his installations: Przeżyją tylko ci, którzy to zaplanowali [Only Those Who Planned It Will Survive] (2009), which depicts life in shelters after a nuclear attack.

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