Collection

The object is both an installation and a tangible document of Niegoda’s artistic activity inspired by a major sports event that brought on patriotic excitement even among those who are not interested in sports on a daily basis.  Citizenship and participating in social life can be understood as the result of living in the same space, but when it comes to culture it is all about emphasizing one’s own individuality. National colours or an agreed interpretation of symbols shape a community, but this unity, strengthened by education and upbringing, is also based on differentiating oneself from all the others, on emphasizing differences that may form the basis of conflicts and exclusions. Hence, Niegoda offers us to tear apart whatever restrains our freedom to be with others outside agreed norms.

Jacek Niegoda’s video is a kind of training manual for those willing to re-enact Lech Wałęsa’s famous 1980 jump over the wall of the Gdańsk Shipyard that became a symbol of the beginning of political changes in Eastern and Central Europe, culminating in the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Niegoda reflects on the recent history of Poland and Europe and in an intelligent and unexpected way redefines the iconic characters, phenomena, and symbols of the transformation era in Europe. The video’s easy and fun atmosphere, however, has a double meaning. Wałęsa, on whom the video’s protagonist is based, is the subject of debate and ambiguously positive evaluations of his contemporaries and often used to antagonize society. Therefore, the interpretation of the meaning of this work remains open to those taking part in disputes concerning Wałęsa’s life choices.

Dorota Nieznalska obtained wooden doors from houses and flats inhabited completely or mostly by the German population until 1945. The installation is accompanied by a black and white sound film featuring archival images and texts about the displacement of the German population from the socalled Regained Territories, that is, the western and northern part of today’s Poland, in the years 1945–1950.

Although the subject of the work is the displacement of Germans following WWII, it can be interpreted in the context of the contemporary refugee migrations around the world. Using the term Heimat, which in German means the land of the fathers, the artist attempted to define the literal loss of the family home and land as a result of an armed conflict.

Meanwhile, the documentary shots featured in the film can be easily confused with images of the wartime exile of the Polish population – showing families with children and all their belongings, driving and walking in difficult weather conditions.

Nieznalska calls for the commemoration of civilian victims, exiled and expelled, uprooted from their homelands, people whose fate has placed them on the wrong side of the conflict. The individual narratives are described as universal in relation to people’s entanglement in political and religious systems.

The video shows the surface of the water, a momentary reflection of the body in its mirror surface, and then a brief moment of surfacing. By creating a specific illusion, Lamella depicts water as an almost solid substance. The water here is not about depth, but rather surface tension.

Lamella takes its title from Lacan’s psychoanalytic theories, where the word means a being that exists beyond the symbolic order, a disembodied eroticism, a membrane of relations with the environment. Here, perception is reduced to the reception of undefined, culturally unfiltered signals, during the spontaneous process of emotionally accepting or rejecting a relationship with another being.

Lamella is an attempt to visualize our point of contact with the world, devoid of realistic representations, when the only truth is an irrational and unrepresented feeling. Therefore, it contains a paradox — the presentation of the impossibility of representation.

Hanna Nowicka’s Scapegoat is a battered, worn-out school sports instrument. Over its leather seat, the artist has thrown a pile of flesh-coloured vulcanized rubber with a plump and sometimes smooth surface resembling human skin. It makes such a realistic impression that it is difficult to control the urge to touch it.

A scapegoat is an innocent victim who in ancient cultures accepted and carried the sins and guilt of the community while simultaneously being excluded from it. In the Judaic tradition, the priest of the temple in Jerusalem, having sprinkled its interior with the blood of the sacrificed bull and goat, selected another one to be led out into a desert or a rocky cliff and carry the guilt of all the people. The ancient Greeks, after selecting a pharmakos — typically a slave, criminal, or a cripple — chased them out of the city so that the plague or defeat would follow. Stigmatization, exclusion, witch-hunts, and hate speech as strategies of action within societies, nations, neighbourhood groups, at universities, schools, offices, and also PE classes, incessantly reproduce this old pattern.

Rubber, next to dust, is a characteristic material used by Nowicka; a substitute for skin. Its velvety surface, the seemingly biological softness of its forms and the colour of flesh, evoke associations with the human body. On the one hand, such layering, covering and revealing individual details of the composition is an expression of the aestheticization of the depiction, but on the other – uncovers deformations, prosthetics, and imperfections. The photographed object is placed between an organic form and an inanimate object, between an emotional experience and a well-thought-out artistic structure.

The warm tones used in the composition of the photograph and the way in which Nowicka arranges linear strips of flesh-coloured material that partially cover and uncover the plane, reveal Nowicka’s painterly experience. By photographing the material that resembles the texture and colour of the skin, the artist evokes associations with corporeality, intimacy, and close interpersonal relations. The amorphous nature of the composition, however, raises anxiety and associations with deformation and destruction. The title of the work clearly indicates the trope of imperfections, suggesting some flaws in the aestheticization of the body and its visual representation.

The 2016 work entitled Ksiądz [The Priest] was inspired by the artist’s childhood memories. The viewer’s attention is drawn to the disappearing figure of a priest who passes by the sketched architecture of modernist blocks. The scene is set against the background of nature, marked with floral motifs and intense colours. Nature and spirituality play an important role in Nowosielska’s painting. Perhaps the artist captured only the moment of doubt and the resulting need for contemplation and silence. This painting can also be understood as a symptom of growing social changes and a critical look at the activities of the Catholic Church, which inevitably become a matter of public discussion, emphasizing the need for a new quality of religious life focused on the spiritual layer. The motif of the retreating priest and the end of a beautiful summer saturated with colours is a clear emphasis on the passing of time and change. Although rather symbolic, it is a clear voice speaking to today’s social changes and struggles for a new quality of public life.

The painting appears to focus on and affirm the expressive presence of the women, and positions them in between the discussion on the propaganda stereotype of female labourers and the material realities of their labour. The artist pays particular attention to representations of women and women's art. She depicts them as active subjects, modifies and interprets their images, placing them in new contexts and across different media. Processing and giving new meanings to art and design involves exploring the history of art but also fashion, whose essence, after all, is presenting particular characters in a certain way.

Anna Orbaczewska’s drawings depict an exhausted, overloaded, impatient woman who is subjected to violence. Thus, traditional cultural tropes are mixed with what is often hidden deep beneath the surface of familial and social relations. The protagonists refer to dramatic female characters from the prose of Günter Grass; their fate was affected by war and social repressions.

Devoted to violence and toxic relations between genders, their expression is completely different from the artist’s easel paintings. They are quick, brutal reports of difficult situations and emotions. The transition from light to darkness and the unspeakable is an extraordinary discovery for the viewer. Against the backdrop of movements such as #metoo and women’s rebellion against cultural and structural violence, Orbaczewska’s voice resonates with particular force, especially when we view her small drawings on paper up close. Recently, her paintings also introduce this expressive, dark atmosphere.