When you’ve been into cars for a minute, you start to see and explore them in a different way than the common eye would. My fascination started with an appreciation of the object itself — its beauty, superficially, its smoothless under the palm of the hand, bearing no space for accident, only perfection. I had the same approach as Roland Barthes in his 1957 essay “New Citroen” when he states “I think that cars today are (…) the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object”.
Cold Juxtaposition
ByAda Zielińska
Ada Zielińska
Ada Zielińska
I started to feel an urge to challenge the object on an aesthetic level: destroy its beauty to reveal its vulnerability.
Ada Zielińska
As I was deepening in my journey, I started to feel an urge to challenge the object on an aesthetic level: destroy its beauty to reveal its vulnerability. During this stage of fascination, I burnt cars, crashed them, drowned them which I documented in my “Automotive Still” series. While working with damaged cars, I encountered a feeling of growing fear, one you’d experience driving by a major car crash, when you try to narrate yourself what must have happened. By that time, I realized that a car is nothing more than a death trap, a killing machine as well as an extension — or a prosthesis” to the human body. “Juxtaposition” is a material comparison between cars and human anatomy, putting together quasi abstract segments of skin and matter, the compositions are paired by structure, color and material to evoke the body’s objectivity and vulnerability.
Ada Zielińska (b. 1989) is an art director and photographer based in Warsaw, Poland.