MONIKA ORPIK MANUAL OF PARTICIPATION
Time never stood still for Bosnia and Herzegovina, despite the long and irrational 1990s. Polish artist Monika Orpik seeks to provide a different deconstruction of a lost chronology of post-Yugoslav happenings. By focusing on the relationship between struggle and resistance across time, she comes up with three diachronic chapters that touch upon sacrifice, the end, and hope.
“Manual of Participation” reveals the diachronic timeline of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The viewer gets an insight of how someone born in Bosnia and Herzegovina recognises time. The chronological line is broken into pieces, scattered before, during, and after the Balkan War in the 1990s. The ones who lived those chapters, or still are immersed in them, might name the three times as: “the time of organised sacrifice”, “the time before the end”, and “the time of hope”. The decomposition of chronology makes the experience of Bosnians more familiar to the viewer, and most importantly reveals how the community there can grow strong together and, at the same time, segregate and isolate each other easily due to political power struggle. (2017—)
Monika Orpik (b.1997) is an artist from Poland, currently based in Berlin. Through the medium of photography and experimental processes in the darkroom, she tries to explore the subject of trauma of post-conflict communities and question the influence of art on the process of reconciliation. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Photography from London College of Communication. Check more of her stuff here: www.monikaorpik.com