Obszar obrazów efemerycznych, Poznań

Ephemeral Images Area - street sculpture by Professor Jan Berdyszak, located in Poznań at the southeastern part of the Kaponiera Roundabout.

The installation was unveiled in April 2009. The author is a professor at the University of Arts in Poznan. The sculpture is intended to illustrate to passers-by the short-lived, focussed and transient nature of urban images - things that every citizen of a large city passes by every day in their dynamic movement. Janusz Bałdyga said that despite its monumental scale, the sculpture has no semantic vector, its function is rather to transform urban space, to show the dynamism and transience of images and their meanings.

The ensemble consists of seven objects - mirrors and glass in massive metal I-beams. The glass elements have varying degrees of transparency, colour, reflectivity and tilt in relation to the ground. All this causes that a passing viewer is attacked by a range of diverse images.

The genesis of this work was Berdyszak's interest in the so-called ephemeral photography. The artist is fascinated by impermanent images that appear every day in nature, such as reflections on the surface of water surfaces, window panes or puddles. Situating the objects in the area of Kaponiera makes them enter a dialogue not only with diverse architecture of the area but also with its rich history.

The elusiveness and uniqueness of the views offered to each individual viewer means that each viewer can interpret the sculpture uniquely and ephemerally. The installation is a symbol of the pulsating and changing city at every moment. The form of the sculpture - black I-beams - refers instead to the aesthetics of 19th century industrial structures.