Collection

In 2006, Bownik visited a number of computer game tournaments in Warsaw, observing their participants. He found e-athletes curious as a new species of competitors bred on the intersection of technology and cultural change. This was when he created the Gamers and Training Rooms series portraying players and champions’ rooms, as well as the final cycle closing the triptych, E-Słodowy, two pieces of which are in the Foundation’s collection. The title of this series refers to the last name of a DIY populariser in socialist Poland, creator of the Zrób to sam (Do It Yourself) TV programme. The artist re-enacts and documents objects used to improve virtual reality: chewing gum to immobilise a keyboard shelf slide, a Teflon frying pan used as a mousepad. One photograph shows blue tape marking the optimum chair-to-monitor position, another depicts cardboard objects modelling a gamer’s perfect desk space arrangement. In his photographs of all items, Bownik consciously references minimalism, abstraction, and constructivism.

Photographer. A philosophy graduate of Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin and photography graduate of the University of Arts in Poznań. He is the author of photographic cycles sometimes developed over several years using painstaking and demanding methods, extremely precise in documenting self-staged situations. While some of his photographs may be interpreted as akin to an anthropological study, important fields of his work include semantics of image, references to historical photography, and correlations between technology and everyday life. Polityka Passport Award nominee in 2014. That year, his book Disassembly was awarded the main prize in the Photographic Publication of the Year competition and nominated for the Kassel Photobook Award. He lives and works in Warsaw.