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Anita Witek: Unforeseeable Occurrences

128 pages

49 b / w- and 10 colour illustrations

hardcover

Leipzig May, 2023
ISBN: 9783959057431
Edition Number: 1

Width: 22 cm
Length: 26 cm

Language(s): English, German

Designer
Karin Holzfeind

Text
Joseph Constable, Anita Witek

Anita Witek’s artistic work focuses on our habitual ways of seeing. Taking the medium of photography as her starting point, she examines both our perception and the truth content of images and texts disseminated via mass media. Unforeseeable Occurrences is a series of photographic works that Witek began in 2020. The source material consists of fragments of popular science magazines from the 1980s, whose primary focus is on natural science and technology and debates on related topics. The historical issues selected by Witek centred on speculative visions of a future world, which encountered the unforeseeable present in the collages the artist made during the pandemic.

„Echoes of the Covid pandemic and fraught online interactions reverberate through this work, from titles such as Parasocial Breakup or Trollfarm to the source material itself. If living through Covid felt like existing within a science fiction narrative, this book could be the outtakes.“

—Morwenna Kearsley, source. Thinking Through Photography, #112, November 2023

 
Anita Witek works with collage, photomontage, and photoplastics in interior and exterior spaces. She studied photography at the RCA in London and painting at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
 
Joseph Constable studied at the RCA in London and was previously associate curator at London’s Serpentine Galleries. He is currently head of exhibitions at the De La Warr Pavilion, UK.