Statement
For most of my life, I was the material. As an actor, I worked with my body, voice, thought and emotion, taking part in the making of performance from within. After some time, I returned to the creative process from a different perspective: no longer through my own presence on stage, but by looking at the image, memory and representation of the human being.
My visual practice grows out of that experience of working with the body. I move between photography, objects, installation and self-developed software, treating both the body and technology as materials through which an image can be produced, altered or gradually dismantled.
I am moved by the moment when a person is reduced to an image, data, a function, a trace or a physical remnant. I examine how human images are used and processed: in the cloud, in archives, in systems of control, but also through ordinary gestures of looking, recording and preserving.
My work returns to questions of memory, identity, visibility and subjectivity. For me, an image is never a neutral record of reality. It is a field of tension in which what is intimate is exposed to the pressures of technology, work, politics, time and decay.
I look at the fragile human being, continually processed by systems we have created ourselves: systems that increasingly begin to speak for us, remember for us and look for us.
Bio
Piotr Bajtlik (b. 1982, Mysłowice) is a visual artist and photographer based in Warsaw. He studies photography at the Magdalena Abakanowicz University of the Arts in Poznań.
Before developing his visual practice, he worked for two decades as an actor and voice artist. He graduated from the Aleksander Zelwerowicz National Academy of Dramatic Art in Warsaw and was a member of the company of the Polish Theatre in Warsaw for fifteen years. The experience of working through the body, voice and borrowed identities directly informs his current practice, which explores memory, representation and the reduction of the human being to an image, function, trace or remnant.
He works across photography, objects, installation, video and self-developed software.