Return on Invest: Magdalena Pilko

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In Return on Invest, we see recent work, with the title Interviewing Ornaments, by photographer Magdalena Pilko (1979). This work is actually still in full development. It concerns a series of photographs that Pilko started taking during walks in The Hague. During these walks she encountered basal compositions in the constructed environment, such as patterns for instance, that might not be instantly noticeable when passing by, but that receive a certain meaning without losing their abstract quality. In Interviewing Ornaments we see these compositions highlighted, framed, or duplicated.

This method is characteristic of Pilko. As in previous works she plays with the impossibility to capture things in a literal way. What she shows is specific and yet it is not about a story, not about the content of the image, but about looking itself. She refers to the writer W. G. Sebald in Unheimliche Heimat: 'In looking we feel, how things look at us and understand, that we are not here to permeate the Universe, but to be permeated by it.'

Everything looks at you, according to Pilko, and is continually moving. This is why her images often slide to and fro in the black image plane, seem to find their place and then do not after all. What we see are both very rational shapes and spatial or architectural associations. They are given space in the photographs and refer to a possibly different logic.

www.pilko.nl

Magdalena Pilko, Interviewing Ornaments, 2012
photo: © Rob Kollaard, courtesy Stroom Den Haag

Magdalena Pilko, Interviewing Ornaments, 2012
photo: courtesy the artist

Invite (design Thonik, Amsterdam)