Book Preview and Signingwith Izabela Pluta

Izabela Pluta – Lumina: The Photic Atlas (Perimeter Editions 108) is Pluta’s third publication with Perimeter Editions, and works to map and expand upon the artist’s site-responsive project, Lumina, at Heide Museum of Modern Art, which explores the intersection of photography with concepts of time, memory, notions of impermanence, and questions of place. Made over the course of a year, and aligned with each change of season, Pluta worked in situ with curator Melissa Keys at Heide Modern, exposing lengths of silver gelatin photographic paper to the changing natural light. Laid out across the terrazzo floor, the artist used the modernist building as a type of camera and an unwitting collaborator, registering subtle shifts of shadows and streams of light as they passed through the glass walls and windows. Other similarly unconventional approaches to recording and spatial intervention unfold throughout the former home, engaging the senses and drawing our eye to things often unseen. Extending from the exhibition, the book takes on the role of a compendium or workbook, gathering the peripheral and actual processes of the project. In this way, it functions both as a continuation of the exhibition and a critical ledger of its conditions of possibility.

Featuring essays by Melissa Keys and Witold Kanicki, alongside creative texts by critical art and poetry collective Snack Syndicate (Andrew Brooks and Astrid Lorange), the book also features photographs and video stills depicting Pluta’s childhood home in Warsaw, Poland, the interior of which was gutted and stripped back by its current owner, with tree stumps marking the places where conifer trees once flourished in the yard. These images forensically map out this personally significant place that still holds the patina of her family’s presence. In direct contrast to the fixity associated with the photographic image as a record of a moment in time, Pluta’s fieldwork methodology reveals a dynamic sense of continuous unfolding and entropy, articulating a fluid mode of moving through and being in the world.