Perimeter Editions x Izabela Pluta | Sydney Book Launch

Join us at UNSW Galleries to celebrate the launch of Lumina: The Photic Atlas (Perimeter Editions 108), the new publication by artist Izabela Pluta. As part of the launch, hear from Izabela Pluta in conversation with the critical art and poetry collective Snack Syndicate (Andrew Brooks and Astrid Lorange), as they discuss Pluta’s expanded photographic practice. Following the conversation, guests are invited to stay for a celebratory drink.

Copies of Lumina: The Photic Atlas will be available to purchase at the launch, along with a small number of special editions that include a signed and editioned unique lumen print.

EVENT DETAILS
UNSW Galleries
Cnr Oxford St & Greens Rd
Paddington NSW 2021
Thursday November 13, 5.30pm–7pm
Register here

ABOUT THE BOOK

The work of Izabela Pluta may enlist the optical, chemical, and technical processes of the camera and darkroom as its central pillar, but to describe her practice in terms of photography would seem insufficient. Over a career stretching the best part of two decades, the Polish-born Australian-based artist has forged a rigorous body of work that critically excavates the underpinnings of the photographic process, its modes of presentation, its fallibilities, and its broader implications. Her work is expressly photographic, but its bearings stretch far beyond the lens.

Lumina: The Photic Atlas – Pluta’s third book for Perimeter Editions – works to map and expand upon the artist’s site-responsive project, Lumina, at Heide Museum of Modern Art in Melbourne, which explores the intersection of photography with concepts of time, memory, notions of impermanence, and questions of place. Made over the course of a year, and aligned with each change of season, Pluta worked in situ with curator Melissa Keys at Heide Modern, exposing lengths of silver gelatin photographic paper to the changing natural light. Laid out across the terrazzo floor, the artist used the modernist building as a type of camera and an unwitting collaborator, registering subtle shifts of shadows and streams of light as they passed through the glass walls and windows. Other similarly unconventional approaches to recording and spatial intervention unfold throughout the former home, engaging the senses and drawing our eye to things often unseen. Extending from the exhibition, the book takes on the role of a compendium or workbook, gathering the peripheral and actual processes of the project. In this way, it functions both as a continuation of the exhibition and a critical ledger of its conditions of possibility.

Featuring essays by Melissa Keys and Witold Kanicki, alongside creative texts by critical art and poetry collective Snack Syndicate (Andrew Brooks and Astrid Lorange), the book also features photographs and video stills depicting Pluta’s childhood home in Warsaw, Poland, the interior of which was gutted and stripped back by its current owner, with tree stumps marking the places where conifer trees once flourished in the yard. These images forensically map out this personally significant place that still holds the patina of her family’s presence. In direct contrast to the fixity associated with the photographic image as a record of a moment in time, Pluta’s fieldwork methodology reveals a dynamic sense of continuous unfolding and entropy, articulating a fluid mode of moving through and being in the world.

Purchase Lumina: The Photic Atlas here.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Izabela Pluta is a Polish-born, Australian-based artist whose expanded photographic practice has developed a unique visual language of spatial and representational means to signal a different modality of vision. Her work pushes the limits of photography as a medium and practice, developing a way of working that physically and conceptually navigates states of uncertainty.  Pluta’s work has been presented in significant exhibitions at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, UQ Art Museum, UNSW Galleries, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Bundanon Art Museum, Museum of Warsaw, Poland, and Spazju Kreattiv, Malta. Izabela is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Art & Design, UNSW.

Snack Syndicate (Andrew Brooks and Astrid Lorange) 
Andrew Brooks is a Lecturer in Media and Culture in the School of the Arts and Media, UNSW. Astrid Lorange is a Senior Lecturer in Art, Writing, and Cultural Theory in the School of Art & Design, UNSW. Together, they make texts, installations, public programs, and study spaces as the critical art collective Snack Syndicate. Their collection of essays, Homework, was published in 2021 by Discipline. Their current book project, The Art of Unmaking: Abolition and Aesthetics in Australia, reads contemporary art in relation to police power, settler colonialism, and abolitionist horizons.