Sopot Beach 

 

’Photographic scribbles from Sopot Beach’’ is a series of documentary photographs made by Ela Kinowska from March 2020 to April 2021. Sopot beach has become a shelter for the artist, a kind of refuge during a pandemic.

Those images are not only a record of the world during a pandemic, but also a tool for taming the difficult reality. The artist’s narrative tells a story about a sense of emptiness, loneliness, longing for a relationship with another human being, for freedom. The photographs taken in such an extraordinary time are also a pretext for her to reflect on the future. The horizon line becomes an imaginary border zone, a point of reference in anticipation of a "new world" that will restore the old one and open up new opportunities.

People appear very sporadically in these photographs, they appear on the margins of the narrative led by the artist. What matters is the relationship between land, sky and sea.  Kinowska records the surroundings in painterly shots underlying the dynamics of changing weather conditions, random objects appear making a different record of the place every day.

The unlimited space of the sea is not only an area of ​​artistic creation, but also a pretext for mental journeys to the past, to look for memories. The state of loneliness and isolation is illustrated with photographic frames of Sopot beach, the camera becomes a personal photographic diary.

 

Mariola Balińska - Project Curator