About

Ryszard.net is the website of visual artist and researcher Ryszard Dabek. Following an extensive career as a teacher and academic (most notably sixteen years as a a tenured lecturer at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney) Dabek now operates as a free agent. His work and projects have been exhibited in a wide range of international contexts and venues including artist-run spaces, commercial galleries, institutional spaces and everything in between. In addition, Dabek has been an active participant in a number of  key artist-run organisations including First Draft and Loose Projects. His work is held by a number of collections including Artbank and The Australia Council for the Arts.

Dabek’s artistic practice encompasses a range of forms and mediums including photography, film, video and sound . These imaging and dissemination technologies are used to posit a fluid, expanded field of inquiry that often takes the photographic trace as its starting point. Much of Dabek’s recent work coalesces around ideas and approaches engaged with the recent past. In particular he is fascinated by the idea of a present haunted by the spectral vestiges of Modernity.  Architectural form (utopian or otherwise), modernist design and cinematic reflexivity are all pivotal to this fascination. Central to his practice is a critical and  sustained engagement with pre-digital  photographic and moving image forms and the ways it can interface with the contemporary digital moment.

Ryszard Dabek acknowledges and pays respect to the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, the traditional custodians of the land on which he works and lives.
He pays his respects to Elders past, present and emerging.