The title "desert sands" is a combination of two car paint names. The body of a Volvo car has been transformed into small drones. The safe family car, converted into cameras of war, is, on the one hand, a visualisation of the transition from the era of cars to the era of drones: unmanned flying devices used as killing machines, spying, photographing, filming and locating objects and people. On the other hand, it is a dramatic tale of the disintegration of family, bonds, community and friendship in favour of a civil war, an unequal battle, an air attack on a vulnerable, trusting person. A work about the end of personal security.

 

Zuzanna Janin

Zuzanna Janin makes sculptures, installations, videos, photographs and performances. She is also a creator of performance art in theatre. She is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and a scholarship holder of the ECAV (École Cantonale d'Art du Valais in Sierre). She received her PhD from the University of Fine Arts in Poznań in 2016 and her postdoctoral degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk in 2020. The artist teaches at the Art Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences. She is interested in space, memory and time, as well as states of 'in-between'. She transforms waste and leftovers into objects and sculptures, and makes pioneering use of materials, creating works from cotton wool, clothes, parachute silk or inflatable moulds. She has participated in the Sydney Biennale (1992), Istanbul Biennial (1992), Soonsbeek (1993), Liverpool Biennial (1996), Łódź Biennale (2010) and Venice Biennale (2011), as well as the show Collection of 20th and 21st Century Sculpture at the National Museum in Kraków (2022). Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, TOP Museum in Tokyo, Kunstmuseum in Bern, Kunsthalle in Vienna, MAM in Rio de Janeiro, Salzburger Kunstverein, Jeu de Pomme in Paris, Japanese Palace in Dresden, among others. Lives and works in Warsaw.