By Weronika Perłowska

When radical pessimism is the key media narrative and dystopia becomes the only expected form of the future, one of coping strategies is not taking anyone and anything seriously.

In the past couple of years in Polish media, a lot of articles have begun to appear about the prospect of World War III. The noisy headlines are often accompanied by abstract atomic mushroom clouds, scenes from computer games or from science fiction films. The imagination of war is banal and stereotypical. The surreal aesthetic serves mass production, which is aided by the sale of eye-catching images. With every new piece of information, we become more indifferent. The overabundance of news, sources, online discussion and arguments, inflamed by fake news and post-truth, makes it impossible to take a real stance. It is a new type of contemporary propaganda – one that aims not to convince us of its truthfulness, but rather to make us stop believing in anything in particular at all.

I've taken photos from articles about a possible World War and printed them onto clothes, mugs, pillows. It is this type of objectification of war which is a tool-making online articles more “clickable”. I use the party setting as a means of portraying alienation and disorientation of my generation (so-called millennials).