Karolina Freino was born in 1978. She studie at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw (sculpture), Edinburgh College of Art (School of Sculpture) and Bauhasu University in Weimar (MFA Public Art and New Artistic Strategies). Since 2007 she has been an assistant in the Department of Sculpture of the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław. She was granted with several scholarships, among others, Alfred Töpfer Stiftung (2005/6) and the Scholarship of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (2012). Since 2006 he has been collaborating with Dušica Dražić (SRB), Sam Hopkins (UK/KEN) and Teresa Luzio (P) as “usually4”. Walls and Sandpits is a project originally completed in the OFFicyna gallery in Szczecin; the work deals with the issue of using prewar German and Jewish gravestones as a building material in postwar Szczecin. These gravestones were used en masse to build walls, sandpits, dumpsters or sidewalks throughout the city. The project was developed on two parallel planes: documentary and artistic one. As part of the documentary plane, the artist, with help of users of the Internet forum of sedina.pl, a portal of Old Szczecin aficionados, set a list of forty places where gravestones were used as a building material. Then she prepared photographic documentation of them. She also issued a letter to the City Historic Preservation Officer asking for comment on this issue. The artistic activities were carried out in the public sphere of print media. For one month, the artist regularly published “obituaries” in four major Szczecin’s newspapers (Gazeta Wyborcza, Głos Szczeciński, Kurier Szczeciński and Moje Miasto). They contained fragments of preserved, readable inscriptions, together with a translation into Polish, and a photo of the gravestone with a description of its location.
www.karolinafreino.com
