In the project Elevation Above Everyday Existence, an inscription of the work’s title was to be made on the rooftops of the modernist Schillerpark Estate in Berlin, such that it would both be legible to passengers on aeroplanes departing from Tegel Airport and visible on satellite photos. The title relates to Berlin’s post-war history, and in particular to the air channel that linked West Berlin with the rest of the Western Block. In Kenyan Pyramids, a work carried out in Nairobi, the artist concentrates on the everyday activities of women in that country. Using the motif of the traditional potato pyramid  that she noticed at the markets there, she creates a temporary monument to the absence of women from official life.  In the intervention Over the Rainbow in Bystrzyca Kłodzka, meanwhile, the artist installed a music box with a crank in the whole left by a ventilation outlet in the facade of a tenement house. The music box , which could be started by a chance passer-by, played the melody of the song from the musical The Wizard of Oz. In the intervention, Dear Guest, We Are Cleaning Your Room carried out in the industrial area in Bat Yam, Israel, on every single door-handle in the area the artist placed a hotel sign informing that the service was currently cleaning the guest’s room. This was a done as a commentary on the controversial phenomenon of gentrification, commonly emerging in contemporary post-industrial cities. 

In the works especially created for the exhibition in the Kordegarda Project: Birds and Blind Spot, alongside the spatial context, an important factor is equally the temporal one. In February 2008, the Skarpa Cinema – designed by Zygmunt Stępiński (who also designed the housing estate where the Kordegarda Project is located) – was replaced by the Foksal Residence estate opened in February 2012. These works comment in an interesting way on the absence of the cinema from the field of vision of the gallery’s windows. In Divisions, meanwhile, the bars placed by the artist in the windows of the Kordegarda Project reproduce, on a larger scale, those present in the windows of the flats right above the gallery’s entrance. The project serves as an ironic comment on the changes occurring in the architecture of Polish cities, interpreting them also in a wider context, as a symbolic illustration of the functioning of public life in Poland.

Karolina Freino, born in 1978. Studied at the Academy of the Fine Arts in Wrocław (sculpture), at Edinburgh College of Art (School of Sculpture) and at the Bauhaus University in Weimar. From 2007, she has been an assistant at the Sculpture Department of the Academy of the Fine Arts in Wrocław. From 2006, she has been working with Dušica Dražić (SRB), Sam Hopkins (UK/KEN) and Teresa Luzio (P) as the artistic group Usually4. She lives and works in Wrocław.