Hannah Collins

The cinematic format used by Hannah Collins (b. 1956, London) in this silver halide black-and-white photograph mounted on canvas places the viewer at the centre of the picture. In the Course of Time VII, Huta Chemical Works Silesia (1996) shows a nondescript urban winter landscape situated in an industrial area in the modern Polish city of Nowa Huta, in Silesia. Now a neighbourhood within Krakow, this former communist city was built around a large steelwork in the 1950s by the Soviet government. In this large-scale image, which Collins describes as an ‘anti-monumental monument’, she dispassionately captures post-communist reality. She does not seek to either embellish or discredit it, but instead provides viewers with a physical confrontation that leaves them free to create their own associations. This industrial landscape, stripped of all narrative elements, stands somewhere between fiction, documentation and memoir, as a metaphor for the profound transformation and economic upheaval of the Post-Communist era.