Svetlana Kopystiansky

For the part of the project titled Ontology, or Things that Might Have Been Svetlana Kopystiansky made 40 photographs from various selected objects: tools and materials which were used by different artists in a project for production of their artworks. These found objects were considered as finished art works, as sculptures. Images of each object were printed as black-and-white posters in multiple editions and were distributed around the city in various combinations. At the time of the photographs’ distribution, the objects no longer existed in their documented form.

For the part of her project titled Travels and Leaves Behind, over the period of one month Svetlana Kopystiansky made 40 photographs of various objects at the sites where they were found: tools and materials which were used by construction workers during the restoration of the Westfälisches Landesmuseum in Münster. All these objects were mass-produced and originally were identical in form to countless others. When they were photographed, however, their original forms had been altered by use and, thus, subjected to a process of “individualization” in which each object became absolutely unique in its new form. All of these objects were also exhibited in the museum as sculptures. Black-and-white photographs of these sculptural works were later exhibited during the Sculpture Project at the museum.

For the catalog, Svetlana Kopystiansky used texts from the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Brockhaus Enzyklopädie from their entries concerning “Sculpture.”