In her final work, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Susan Sontag writes that images are always produced with a point of view. 

Drawing from Virginia Woolf’s 1938 Three Guineas, in which Woolf held that “photographs are a means of making ‘real’ (or ‘more real’) matters that the privileged and the merely safe might prefer to ignore,” Sontag suggests that within this record of the “real,” there is the individual who takes the record, and then a viewer, who may decide how to receive it. 

Through subjective framing and, consequently, narrative, images rely upon a viewers interpretation to be situated and understood: the viewer must abstract what they can or want to from with visual, and then decide what to do with it.

But what happens when these images of the “real,” in their first presentation, are abstracted even further, quite literally, through video stills and by glitches? What occurs when they are viewed in New York? In a window, on a street? What does the literal point of view do to alter the narrative of record taking, of what is “real” within the frame? 

In Irreality. Trust in Children. Some Future. (2022), artist duo Karolina Markiewicz and Pascal Piron use glitching video imagery to further Sontag’s idea, skewing the photographic image (here: a video —a sequencing of images — and a single extracted still) via abstraction, adding another layer of real and “more real,” as the viewers’ eyes fix on a quadrant before the image shifts again, or offering an opportunity to depart from engagement altogether as the visual blurs, colors and shapes sometimes skewing beyond recognition.£

The video, lasting three minutes and thirty eight seconds, begins in a slightly unfocused but identifiable depot of sorts, in Medyka, Poland. As the camera exits the storage hall, the video becomes increasingly disrupted through glitches; the camera continues on but images stagnate, as the audio distorts as well into an elongated groaning, churning white noise, at times somewhat metallic, though consistently disorienting. Within the first minute, the audio shifts as the visual eventually lands in a somewhat identifiable field in Shehyni, Ukraine. The voice of Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir is layered in, on top of itself many times over, producing a soft monastic-like chant, with a melody that is at once foreboding and delicate. The mechanical noises subside, and the viewer sees what might be understood as a blue sky, sunflowers, grass, and a passageway through which individuals walk, moving from left to right. The video continues to devolve into abstracted glitches, bodies passing through in expansive form as the colors and shapes constituting their outlines melt and morph, leaving shadow-like visual traces of their movement, and assuming a painterly, pastose quality. This textural depth, from a succession of images constituting the video, viewable online, to the still displayed at 63 Orchard Street, create a three-dimensional sensation to the work.

In the Spring of 2022, as Russia invaded Ukraine, Karolina Markiewicz and Pascal Piron spent weekends driving eastward from Luxembourg, ferrying multi-passenger vans stocked to the brim with donated medical supplies, food, clothing, diapers, and other critical goods. Arriving at makeshift refugee camps set up on eastern Polish border towns, Markiewicz and Piron delivered the contents of their vans and then turned back toward Luxembourg, each time filling their vehicle with Ukrainian women, children, elderly men, and pets, bringing the refugees to a place of safety, far from war, and far from home. £

During one of their trips, Markiewicz and Piron crossed the border from Medyka, Poland, into Ukraine. As artists, Markiewicz herself from a family affected by war, having fled the Soviet Regime in Poland in the 1970s, the duo consistently work on themes related to the corridor of exile, a concept coined by anthropologist Michel Agier describing the indefinitely long experience that transcends the physical state and becomes written onto the emotional, psychological, and social reality of refugees and those who flee. Collaging segments of what they saw while crossing from Medyka to Shehyni in Irreality. Trust in Children. Some Future., Markiewicz and Piron offer a different visual narrative to the present iteration of war. Through sequencing images into a video and abstracting this into a glitched still, the work provides viewers a multi-dimensional and complex invitation to engage, and potentially “to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers,” as well as the choice to ask “Who caused what the picture shows? Who is responsible?”