weronika gęsicka questions factual truth sources with unique encyclopaedia of fake entries

Weronika Gęsicka mines encyclopaedias for their trap entries

Weronika Gęsicka’s Encyclopaedia is a photographic project and artist book project that turns the idea of authoritative knowledge on its head. The visual artist presents a collection of several hundred fictitious entries sourced from real encyclopedias, dictionaries, and lexicons, including Wikipedia, each illustrated through manipulated stock photographs and AI-generated imagery. These so-called ‘trap entries’ are deliberately false records planted by editors to detect plagiarism. If another publication reprinted the content verbatim, the fake entry would appear as proof.

What Gęsicka has done is excavate them, give them form, and turn them into a book that looks, at first glance, entirely credible. In a moment when the line between fact and fiction grows harder to trace, the question she raises feels less academic and more like a survival skill.

For the artist, the project is also a broader reckoning with how we navigate information today. ”’Encyclopaedia” is an attempt to consider how to function in today’s world, where we are bombarded with fake news every day, and knowledge is neither constant nor certain,’ she tells designboom. ‘It is also a question of what knowledge actually is in an age where successive scientific studies bring ever-new information and what we knew before can quickly become outdated.’

Near Dark. an unfinished American vampire horror film. directed by Ryan Zeller and written by Matt Craven and Kathryn Bigelow. It is a remake of the 1987 cult vamnire-western horror film directed by Kathryn Bidelow | all images courtesy of Weronika Gęsicka and Jednostka Gallery

the mechanics of deliberate falsehood

Some of the entries Gęsicka found would immediately raise suspicion; others are the kind that could slip past even a careful reader, covering fake animals, invented historical events, fictional characters, and objects that never existed. Some publications contained only a single planted mistake; others harbored several dozen.

The resulting book, 252 pages and 862 images printed in an edition of 1,500, has the weight and visual grammar of something authoritative. That is precisely the point. As the Polish artist puts it, ‘How can we distinguish false information from true information when we are inundated with images created by artificial intelligence, and it is increasingly difficult to distinguish them from real photographs?’ she asks. ‘We live in times when we have to verify the reality around us at every turn.’ It is this range between the absurd and the plausible that gives the project its unease, because the entries that are hardest to doubt are also the most dangerous. The controversy around deliberately planting false information in sources meant to verify facts is inseparable from the world we already live in, one where edited photographs are commonplace and AI-generated images are fast becoming just as routine. Knowledge is no longer something fixed, and what remains is the daily task of trying to find out what is actually true.

Weronika Gęsicka, Near Dark, from the ENCYCLOPAEDIA series, 2023–2026

photography as the most convincing lie

Gęsicka deliberately chooses the photographic image as her primary illustrative medium to shape the argument of Encyclopaedia, even when those images are fabricated. Photography still carries an instinctive authority that other media do not, and the artist uses that trust as the ground on which the work operates. ‘The intention to provoke confusion and disorientation in the viewer was also one of the reasons why I used photographs, or images that imitate photographs, in this project,’ she explains. ‘Even today, we still think that photography is the most objective medium, while it is one of the easiest ways to manipulate reality, especially in the age of artificial intelligence. When we see something in the form of a photograph, we immediately assume that it must be true. Perhaps after a moment doubts arise, but our first natural instinct is to simply believe photographs as we believe our own eyes.’ By drawing on visual clichés, old-fashioned illustration styles, stock photo aesthetics, and imagery that already feels like memory, she constructs images so visually familiar that the fiction registers, if at all, only after the fact.

a photographic project that turns the idea of authoritative knowledge on its head

archives, memory, and reinterpretation

Throughout her practice, Gęsicka has worked consistently with archival materials, from images found accidentally online to stock photo libraries, police archives, and press photographs, using them to explore what happens when historical photographs are displaced, reframed, or subtly altered. ‘My works often refer to memory and history, both in the context of the individual and in the broader sense of collective memory,’ she shares with designboom. ‘This is why I work with archives, which, when transformed, reveal their different layers. I try to look for connections between the past and the present, while showing that history is not something finite and closed, but can still be reinterpreted, which gives a wide space for various manipulations.’ In Encyclopaedia, that impulse extends into the encyclopedic form, a genre that has always carried the authority of finality, of things settled and agreed upon. ‘In ”Encyclopaedia,” I also drew on images from the past: I was inspired by old illustrations, famous photographs, and images that each of us carries somewhere in our memory,’ she adds. ‘By using various visual clichés, I wanted to create images that, through their familiar appearance, would blur the line between reality and fiction as much as possible.’

Weronika Gęsicka, Jungftak #2, from the ENCYCLOPAEDIA series, 2023–2026

knowledge in the age of AI and fake news

The book arrives as a timely cultural object. For Gęsicka, Encyclopaedia is not simply a curiosity about publishing mischief but a meditation on the conditions of knowledge today. ‘We have more and more tools to help us separate truth from fiction, but it is becoming more and more difficult to uncover that truth,’ she reflects. An accompanying essay by Charlotte Cotton, an internationally recognized curator and photography theorist, contextualizes the project within broader debates around image manipulation, AI, and the epistemology of visual evidence. Encyclopaedia is published by Blow Up Press and Jednostka Gallery, Warsaw, with book design by Aneta Kowalczyk. Gęsicka is currently nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2026.

Weronika Gęsicka, Jungftak #2 (detail), from the ENCYCLOPAEDIA series, 2023–2026

Jungftak, (n.) a Persian bird; the male of which had only one wing, on the right side, and the female only one wing, on the left side; the male had a hook of bone, and the female an eyelet of bone; and it was by uniting hook and eye that they were enable to fly

Weronika Gęsicka, Jungftak #1, from the ENCYCLOPAEDIA series, 2023–2026

Spanish tickler, a type of torture instrument, consisting of long, sharp iron spikes curved so as to resemble claws. It was often attached to a handle, or else used as an extension of the torturer’s hand. In this way, it was used to rip and tear flesh away from the bone. from any part of the body. It was also used as a weapon

Weronika Gęsicka, Lawrence Douglas Versett, from the ENCYCLOPAEDIA series, 2023–2026

MacMasters, Alan (born 1865), a Scottish scientist, credited with creating the first electric bread toaster. His invention went on to be developed by Crompton, Stephen J. Cook & Company as the Eclipse.

Gęsicka deliberately chooses the photographic image as her primary illustrative medium

Weronika Gęsicka, Dord, from the ENCYCLOPAEDIA series, 2023–2026

a broader reckoning with how we navigate information today

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Encyclopaedia is published by Blow Up Press and Jednostka Gallery, Warsaw

the artist has worked consistently with archival materials

Schwartz, Morton, an American actor, who appeared mostly in European B-movies. Morton Schwartz was born in 1942 in a small town in Idaho. In 1954 the Schwartz family moved to Los Angeles, where Morton's father was offered a job in a small production company. In 1965 Morton starred in a movie for the first time. It was the now classic Vampires Inc.

Peace breaker's muzzle, a torture device which would be fitted to the face of the victim. In the past, various forms of masks and muzzles were used to silence breakers of the peace, whether blasphemers, political firebrands, or wanton gadabouts.

Federlandese, a coin dating back to the 1st century BC, found in the Swedish province of Scania, in the region of Götaland, was used by the Goths. This coin is made of bronze, and contains some runes, typical of the Germanic languages.

project info:

name: Encyclopaedia

artist: Weronika Gęsicka | @wgesicka

essay: Charlotte Cotton | @pimcharlottecotton

book design: Aneta Kowalczyk | @_aneta_kowalczyk_

publisher: Blow Up Press | @blow_up_press and Jednostka Gallery | @jednostkagallery, Warsaw, Poland