Ellen Harvey: Beautiful Ruin

Exactly six years ago, American artist Ellen Harvey was the first guest at the newly founded 
artists-in-residence laboratory program at the Centre for Contemporary Art at Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland. In her exhibition New is Old, she drew attention to the fact that the run-down and neglected Laboratory Building adjacent to the recently reconstructed Castle was in fact the only surviving original structure of the old Castle complex. Using wall painting and a series of seven lavishly framed paintings representing obviously modern spaces in the reconstructed Castle, she transformed one of the destroyed rooms in the Laboratory Building into a palace in its own right, contrasting it with the inauthentic Castle next door.

Six years later, to mark the opening of the renovated and extended Laboratory building, viewers can see Harvey's new site specific project Beautiful Ruin. The windows and doors in the new exhibition space will be covered in plexi-glas mirrors hand-engraved with a drawing that locates the new space in a tragic future where the adjacent Ujazdowski Castle has been reduced to romantic forested ruins for a second time. Light sources behind the doors and daylight coming in through the windows allow the viewers to see themselves mirrored inside a drawing in light.

Ellen Harvey's new project, apparently so innocent, romantic and beautiful, is also perversely ambiguous. Is the newly renovated Laboratory indeed so beautiful? What is the future of Ujazdowaski Castle? Is the return to the past the right way? Past - future, novelty - antiquity, splendour and ruins interlace with the complex history of the site to question the direction of the new art space.