In 1999, Michal Szlaga began his work on the Gdansk Shipyard, which he continues to this day. A shipyard seen as the birthplace, heyday and decline of the Solidarity labor movement and an example of a once thriving shipbuilding industry, the remnants of which should be preserved from oblivion today. The "Shipyard" project, created over the years, consists of photographs documenting the history of the last two decades of this iconic plant for Polish social and political change. Some of the material collected during these years of artistic and documentary activities was used in the author's book "Shipyard," first published by the Karrenwall Foundation in 2013. Michał Szlaga's works can be found in the collections of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the National Museum in Gdańsk, and the CCA in Warsaw, among others.
He treats photography and related media as an excuse to explore the world. He believes in the power of long-term long-term observation. An excellent example of this is the "Shipyard" project, which has been running continuously since 1999, and which already includes more than a dozen component realizations devoted to this place, penetrating successive areas of "lost knowledge." The problem of the "Gdansk Shipyard" is so close to his heart that at one point the Shipyard became his home. For a short period he was also a shipyard worker - in 2003, he was employed as a ship painter-sandblaster.
The artist's work with one place and treating it like a laboratory in which he explores successive areas of knowledge translates into the creation of an elaborate study that allows for a broad multi-level analysis of the problems of transformation, not only in terms of Gdansk.For Szlaga, the subject has become a kind of metaphor for Polish transformation, taking place under the influence of the global capitalist order. A transformation of which we are still an object.
The book "Shipyard" was at the same time the first solid historical research of the site - through its publication he became politically involved in changing the law. The idea that the subject should be developed by an artist using the tools of art to do so, becoming an activist in his own right, limited only to the area of art, proved successful. Today, thanks to the book, among other things, the objects that are its "heroes" are under conservation protection.
The book also became part of the exhibition "SHIPYARD - DOCUMENTS OF LOSS" and is already in the collections of the National Museum in Gdansk, the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle as an object.
