Disassembly

Disassembly is a photographic series by the Polish artist Bownik. Mundin, a Warsaw press, published it in 2013 as a two-volume set: one book of images and a companion volume carrying an essay by the American critic Andrew Berardini.

The work was shown at Starter Gallery in Warsaw that fall, as part of the third Warsaw Gallery Weekend, alongside Bownik's related series Every Imitation Disappoints. Bownik works exclusively in large-format photography. He treats the camera as a tool for testing and subverting the conventions of the medium, building images that read as familiar and uncanny at once.

Bownik is the professional name of Paweł Bownik, born in 1977. He studied philosophy and sociology in Lublin, then earned a photography and multimedia degree from the Poznań Academy of Fine Arts. He lives and works in Warsaw, drawing on youth culture and the visual language of archival photography and 1940s cinema.