Using a varying form of paper cut-outs, - developed over the last years and which i have used in different contexts - painted paper, found materials from Ningbo (most of them from packaging-material of food i ate at that time) and Chinese date- and letter-stamps the series develops from day to day.
At first glance the collages seem to be very similar, but looking at them exactly, each of them gets it‘s own character and leads the viewer to the next one.
After five and a half days walking the trail peters out is a project about hiking journeys in steppe and desert areas of Qhinghai and Gansu Provinces in Western China. In winter 2010/11 I started to follow roads and tracks on foot to what was depicted as nomad camps on maps. Instead I ran into new mining areas and development zones in the middle of nowhere – once mystical nature was taken over by the brutal interests of a new time.
In the last eastern corner of Austria, towards the Czech Republic is Kleinhaugsdorf. The area is a nomansland. Part of it is the entertainment and shopping city called “Excalibur” where busloads of entertainment seeking people, descent to celebrate and shop. Around this compound, wooden huts settled down, run by Chinese merchants selling all the copyright infringement products, they are not allowed to sell in Europe.
I walk. Walking is a movement in perpetual search of a new equilibrium. During my two months stay last summer I wandered, discovering Beijing through daily walks.
How to give back to Beijingers the pleasure they offered me during my first stay? Finding out how became my objective.
Sylwia Gorak is a vocal performer and painter. As a painter, she seeks to reevaluate the inherently awesome beauty of landscapes by introducing man-made objects, both inconsequential and architectural, that create a tension between a sense of permanence and materialism. Inspired by her hometown of Lezajsk, Poland, her paintings also draw from prior residency experiences in London, Osaka, and Sierre, Switzerland.
