Dominik Podsiadly (b. 1967) is a Polish digital artist living and working in Wrocław. He was kicked out of Akademia Sztuk Pięknych we Wrocławiu (Academy of Fine Arts, Wroclaw) where he studied painting in 1991–1994. In the 1990s, he was a founding member of several informal art groups such as NEUE GOTHIK ART, JUJU HOUSE, DDR. Since the 2000s Podsiadly has been working individually.

Apart of being an artist, Podsiadly is also great activist (in the sense of “activating”) and organizer: in 2012 he arranged the Transfer3D, SPEED SHOW in Wroclaw (w. Małgosia Woźnica) and in 2014 initiated and organized the 1 NEAR FIELD COMMUNICATION DIGITAL ART BIENNALE WROCLAW 2014 (shortly #nfcdab biennale) in the streets and galleries of Wrocław.

If I have described Podsiadly as a “digital artist”, it is only because I perceive him as one due to my residency on the Internet, where his recent digital works are most conspicuous. In fact and more precisely, Dominik Podsiadly is a visual artist who uses multiple media–-and one of his most frequent tools happens to be the computer and the Internet. He has a history of action art, multimedia collages and objects, sculptural installations, performative actions and minimalist electronic music. On the Internet he is also known as D0min0, author of jogging-like collages at the “Micro-blog for vulnerable teenagers” which he run together with Bluecow (Jacek Dziubiński, who contributed with his experimental literary texts). According to his own words, Podsiadly’s creative practice has been influenced by Joseph Beuys, mannerism, pop-art, medieval apocalyptic imagery, German painting, dada and punk, and you can feel all of these in his works together with indications of #violence, #sexuality and #provocation.

He has often used found stuff and recycled materials for his works, preferring very simple tools in whatever media, and characteristic low-tech feeling in his videos. This also applies to his net art practice, where he uses uncomplicated tools of expression and low-tech retro visuality. For Podsiadly, conceptual and minimalistic tendencies are quite typical as well as irony, wit, incorporation of written text and western pop-culture (or as I have heard before, “His artworks are saturated with obviousness, mental inertia, clichés and bad jokes.”) and often also with critical and political overtone. His Tumblr is full of nervous violent gifs, Facebook flooded with Podsiadly’s alternative identities and doppelgangers.

In Big Black, the exhibition developed site-specifically for the Screen Saver Gallery, Dominik Podsiadly ironizes the fundamental function of a screen saver—screen-saving—just as the very concept of our gallery that was built around this subject matter.

With this exhibition, Podsiadly brings back the screen saver its original (and nowadays somewhat retro) meaning, thereby closing the circle of additive functions imposed to it by SSG and other galleries in screen savers through their exhibition cycles.

Very well then, let’s save our screens!

Website: http://dominikpodsiadly.xyz/

Bio: http://500letters.org/form_15.php?naam=podsiadly_dominik

ArtStack: https://theartstack.com/artists/dominik-podsiadly