Albert Pocej

Iceland · 2026 · Fourteen photographs

The Engineress

Albert Pocej & Stasy Malyshenko

The Engineress is a cycle of fourteen photographs that creates its own mythology of how a world comes into being. At its centre is a woman creator, moving between primordial nature and structures left behind by people. She works with what she finds: water, volcanic earth, wreckage, tools and her own body.

Made in Iceland, the photographs bring echoes of ancient myths into contact with the remnants of the contemporary world. Creation is inseparable from physical work, chance and responsibility for what takes on a life of its own. The cycle leaves room for more than one reading, inviting viewers to recognise a story of their own.

Explore the fourteen works ↓
Commute through the Collapse — The Engineress, Albert Pocej and Stasy Malyshenko
01 / Commute through the Collapse

The sequence / 00–13

Fourteen works, one cycle.

From the remains, through the conditions of existence, to the work of sustaining what has been made.

Making / Authorship

A physical world.
Two authors.

The photographs were made in Iceland in 2026 through physical staging, without digital compositing. Wreckage, water, steam, fire and salvaged objects belong to the locations and actions photographed. The resulting world emerged through encounters with these materials, rather than from a complete script imposed on the landscape.

Albert Pocej works through the camera; Stasy Malyshenko is co-author and performer. She conceived and performed many of the gestures. The myth took shape through their shared work, discussions, rejected ideas and the limits imposed by the locations and their bodies.

The fifteenth work

What the photograph
cannot carry.

The photographic cycle contains fourteen works. The accompanying book is conceived as a fifteenth: a literary work that carries what the finished photographs leave outside their frames.

Pocej's Iceland essays move from concrete incidents into questions of value, authorship and control. A discarded tractor wheel leads to the difference between a sign of status and a working principle. Drying fish becomes a way to think about what photography preserves and what it removes. A burning jacket makes the cost of light physical.

The manuscript is in development.

The works as objects

Prints & presentation

Works 01–13: archival pigment prints on Ilford Baryta archival paper. Framed size 137 × 100 cm, with a museum frame and TRU VUE Classic AR glass. Each work has an edition of 10 numbered prints and 2 artist’s proofs, with a certificate of authenticity.

00 / The Map of Remains: 87 × 57 cm, with 15 numbered prints created exclusively for the project’s sponsors, plus 2 artist’s proofs (AP).

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