Monika Sosnowska - The Modern institute

Sosnowska creates ambitious architectonic structures and site-specific installations, which simultaneously embrace and resist the spaces they occupy, as well as responding to the social, political and psychological use of space.

Her vocabulary echoes varied and contradictory modernisms; that of Polish constructivism of the 1930s, the minimal and conceptual tendencies from the 1960s and 1970s and the socialist architecture found in Eastern European states.

For more than a decade, Sosnowska has collected visual material, accumulating an archive of photographs taken on walks around Warsaw. Capturing the conditions of everyday life in Poland she focuses on architectural details and structures which serve as tangible reflections of the country's communist past. Beginning from fabricated replicas of existing structures, Sosnowska manipulates their form - forcing them to collapse, twist, invert and distort - resulting in sculptural configurations that alter our perceptions of physical space, whilst challenging our certainties about memory and assumptions about societal structures.