women replicants (2) — greenhouse conditions — Natalia Bażowska, Kinga Bella, Magdalena Starska, Tatiana Wolska
Women Replicants is the cycle of exhibitions at the Small Gallery, which presents the output of some young Polish women artists. The title expression includes a revolutionary potential of generating unknown values, and turning against the system that created them. The opposition to formatting into rational frameworks and stiff, logically justified divisions, as well as the need of strong subjectification of a woman author in cultural strategies become a measure of truthfulness of the recalled stories. The discovering of the sense which is included in details becomes a basis for creation of a new language in which the women artists are not outsiders, but find a place where they can speak about themselves with a shift in relation to the current fallocentric order. Reaching for intimate experiences, they become engrossed in texts, decomposed in toxic secretions of their own net.
‘Women Replicants’ summary book of the cycle of exhibitions This book has been planned as a documentation of an exhibition cycle which was staged at the BWA Contemporary Art Gallery in Katowice in 2010. The works...
women replicants (4) — language as a licking tool — Justyna Gruszczyk and Bianka Rolando In his legendary action How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare? Joseph Beuys is whispering something in the ear of a dead hare carried in his arms....
women replicants (3) — minimal corrections — Alicja Karska and Aleksandra Went Works by Aleksandra Went and Alicja Karska seem to be resistant and tightly closed in their simplicity. Just like in the case of dreams about which we...
women replicants (1) — callousness — Dorota Buczkowska ‘Lilith’, ‘Interror’, … Callousness abolishes consciousness, pain and defensive reflexes. As an operation it results from the need of stiffening and protection from too intense...
Apart from precise tools, delving into author’s visions requires patience and attention; the reading on the run is losing sense. Ideal work conditions prepare a cocoon for imagination, being a kind of greenhouse effect, they make sprouting ideas condense, warming and protecting them. They leave a space for experiment, which includes some risk of error and unexpected results. The hotbed that ensures all this has in itself something from a freak show, curio cabinet, alchemical studio, laboratory, or terrarium. It associates with restrictions of admission imposed in order to ensure an undisturbed state that favours the occurring changes. Entering it requires resetting each time, as well as preparing to submerge in the world which governs with its own principles.
In case of the invited artists a move away from reality resulted in cut-in shot of lunatic walking in the woods, underwater losing of breathing, temporary loss of consciousness, and blinding with too much sun staring. Their works look like something unshaped or wrinkled. They are suspended at the stage of origination, dirty, boggy, marshy, doughy, pasty, stringy and chewy.
Clumsy figures from Magda Starska drawings abandon themselves to tribal activity which keeps their world in heavenly harmony and order. These rituals favour energocirculation between objects, figures and plants. Tropical warmth and caves that are vibrating with colours give refuge to animals, as well as to vegetables and their giant sprouts. Among stalactites and totems leaves, lichen and filamentous nets create whirling balls, bulbs or lumps. This world is only hatching; it is at the most primitive stage of organisation, beyond law and order, and those gelatinous figures from the artist’s private bestiary that inhabit it are behaving according to the temporary mythology.
As a hunter’s daughter, Natalia Bażowska is familiar with hunting; the forest and its inhabitants are her natural environment. Feeling its favourable and life-giving possibilities, she knows that the forest has to be friendly for her, but not always. In blending ritual processes of creation and destruction she tries to give frame to her visions and to find a way of their articulation. Colour streaks of mud are often spilt in her pictures. That phosphorescent cloggy gunk or an unidentified ancient flesh which fills shapes, figures and backgrounds forces us to look and remember lethargy.
To her pictures and objects Kinga Bella glues locks or strands of long dark hair; because of it they start to resemble the most shaggy and clumsy creatures that live in the darkness and in the depth or in other inaccessible areas. Her scalps develop inexorably in warmth and wetness. They look as if stopped in the middle of the road between the masculine and the feminine, in the broken larval stage.
Tatiana Wolska nails planks together into a provisory case, cradle or sarcophagus for a frothy substance which would mature in it. The opening of the shell that surrounds it imitates the gesture of lifting a stone and looking under it into the place which had been so far hidden, crushed and mouldy.
In the ideal work conditions resembling the greenhouse effect you can stare without responsibility or any plan at what’s only appearing. You can come back to the purifying state without form, where the developing structures are very brittle and fragile. They quickly change their shapes and fall apart in the twinkling of an eye, like the majority of non-crystallised situations and misty figures that have, however, a particular power in them.
Curator: Marta Lisok
