CLOSED CIRCUIT – Natalia Brandt

Closed Ciruit, Natalia Brandt’s new project, is a photography-and-sound installation in which the artist presents a series of large-format black-and-white photographs of zoo cages. Empty, barred, the cages become a metaphor of all devices of isolation and segregation. Embodying, like prison cells, the architecture of power, cages are one of the political technologies of exercising it. Social reformers believe that their disciplining character transcends penal practice; the image of the cage supports the asymmetry between triumphant knowledge and ignorance. The paternalism that at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries sanctioned public ‘ethnographic’ displays of ‘savages’, roadshows of caged human specimens. In Brandt’s images there are no imprisoned, enslaved or tamed animals or people, just empty spaces of isolation, like in Piranesi’s drawings showing the prison itself, with its dreary, oppressive architecture. In the images of the empty cages the visibility principle turns towards the systems of supervision. The visualisation is accompanied by sound, provided by a PA system with megaphones, the necessary attributes of prison-camp surveillance or totalitarian indoctrination.

Natalia Brandt was born 1983 in Wągrowiec. She studied painting and drawing at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan (2003- 2009). She obtained a diploma in drawing and painting in prof. Jarosław Kozłowski and dr Dominik Lejman studios (2009). Since 2011 she teaches at V Drawing Studio at the University of Arts in Poznań.