Township #1 (Moat) by Gabriel Orłowski

In Bedlam, Gabriel Orłowski turns his lens toward the peripheries, spaces where survival is improvised, economies flow through shifting channels, and infrastructure is assembled from whatever is at hand. At first glance, the scene resists comprehension: a saturation of sound, movement, and heat, where order seems absent. Yet, with time, a different reality surfaces, one of complex interdependencies, where trade, repair, and exchange form a rhythm as precise as it is precarious.

Orłowski treats these sites not as failed centers, but as systems with their own logic - unstable, yet deeply enmeshed in global supply chains and power structures. His images hold both the dissonance and the efficiency in view, making visible a world that exists between chaos and coherence. In the act of looking, the viewer is asked to navigate the same threshold the photographer inhabits: the shift from disorientation to recognition, from surface impression to a deeper, if never complete, understanding.

Gabriel Orłowski (b. 1989, Poland) is a conceptual, subjective photographer whose work navigates the intersection of the Anthropocene, entropy, and spatial narratives. Based in Warsaw, he holds a Master of Arts degree from the Polish National Film, TV, and Theatre School in Łódź. His practice is rooted in analysis, observation, and a near- or para-documentary aesthetic and ranges from transformed, monumental landscapes to intimate abstract fragments, capturing much of what lies between. Orłowski engages with photography not only as a means of visual storytelling but as an object of inquiry in itself, exploring its communicative potential. He is also an author, collaborator, and collector of photographic zines and books, working in both solitary and collaborative modes to build layered visual archives of place and time.

This artwork was part of EYES WIDE SHUT exhibition in August/September 2025 as part of Kunsttage Basel. 

To navigate the present moment is to move through a dense, shifting labyrinth, one in which historical amnesia, systemic obfuscation, and collective inertia coexist with urgency, resistance, and revelation. EYES WIDE SHUT brings together seven artists from Switzerland, Poland, Italy, and France whose practices dissect the layers of this contemporary maze, revealing the dissonance between perception and reality.
The exhibition title evokes a paradox: the simultaneous act of seeing and refusing to acknowledge, of knowing and yet choosing to look away.