pin-up shits

I often wonder why I put together all these shits called high-flown a cycle of pin-ups. One might have a feeling that this is a mysoginical project – a woman as a thing, an object of fantasies, fetish being pawed by clammy fingers of horny one racked with guilt – me. Well, I'm afraid the problem is deeper then it appears. Disgusting and abomination being contained in the meaning of this project (rotten fruits, crawling worms, a sea of bloody bones, trivial, simply banal eroticism) covered some of my experiences. Experience of psychological aggression, cruelty, wickedness and pain is looming into view out of this contradictory picture, I went through and I'm slowly becoming aware step by step. The pin-ups project is fit rather for detailed psychoanalytic session although It seems to me I did it with myself just by coming the pin-ups project into being. No more pin-ups in my life. It’d not better be wishful thinking. I hope so. But on the other hand next pin-ups (after Bielska Autumn Painting Festival) I put together just because of making money. To my utter amazement someone wanted to buy them, someone bought them. I would never want to hang them on the wall.

2011 - ArtVilnius'11, LITEXPO Lithuanian Exhibition and Convension Centre, Wilno (Lithuania)
2010 - pin-ups, Zone of Contemporary Art, Lodz (PL)
2010 - ArteSantander 2010 XIX Feria Internacional de Arte Contemporaneo, Palacio de Exposiciones y Congresos, Santander (Spain)
2010 - Glamour, 6 inSPIRATION, Szczecin (PL)
2009 - Slick 09, Centquarte, Paris (France)
2008 - Berliner Liste 08, Berlin (Germany)
2008 - 22nd festival of Polish Contemporary Painting, The Castle of Pomeranian Princes, Szczecin (PL) Artluk magazine award
2008 - Sexhibition, Studio ACH! Group of artistic studios, Warsaw (PL)
2007 - Bielska Autumn, Bielska BWA Gallery, Bielsko-Biała (PL)

life is elsewhere

Behind each facade of the old age of a town, the old age that we inherit, there is some yard full of surprises, that can be a reflection of this ‘good’ world. These backyards annoy particularly the real bourgeois who live in better districts and their car parks and gardens border on the real slum. There is no way to eradicate it, so there appear curtains, partitions, fences and dividers. These curtains always appear on both sides to emphasise mutual sovereignty. In reality, it is a city symbiosis, because each of these worlds divided by the wall looks at its reflection in the other one, compares, follows, peeps and controls what happens behind the wall. It is connected with a longing for a better world (sometimes the erected wall is to hide what is unattainable) and a great sentiment for what is known, familiar, tamed and safely enclosed from the rest of the world. At the same time, through the gaps in the fence there oozes the longing for the southern seas and a better, always remote other life... In a small, provincial, Prussian town something what we call the culture of szalereks* (correct: szajerek [PL]= shed) has formed. It is our good backroom, sometimes it is scary to set a foot there, but always interesting, intriguing, thrilling. From there, from the hiding, it is better (and without shame) to peep one’s dreams. *Szalereks (szajerek) – this interesting local word, which well renders the atmosphere of Chelmionka (The Chelmno Suburb), in the old days the quintessence of suburb life, remote from the centre, sleepy, second class (as in B. Schulz).
"At the entrance to Center of Contemporary Art in Torun (Poland) artists (Dorota Chilinska and Andrzej Wasilewski) have built a shed. The annexe adjacent to the facade of the building – a temple of art bears witness to destruction and poverty. Such places serve gathering things apparently or potentially useful. As Krystian Kowalski wrote: “ (...) We shall sometimes manage to use these things again. Flowerbeds are made of old tyres, a garden shed out of used bottles. Sometimes we invent various probable situations that may happen and bring each of the objects back to life. These concentrations of objects are a souvenir of our every day, our biographies an our everyday histories. They are not rubbish yet, only junk. After some time we finally forget that such objects have ever existed (...)”. The countryside invisibly becomes such a backroom, an annexe for cites as a “source of basic resources consumed, a place to locate facilities serving spending free time, a heap for refuse of city life – nuclear waste, rubbish, criminals and old people” (Kuvlesky, Coop 1983). Can we still use earlier experiences of the country, or do we merely allow them become overgrown with spider webs, hidden in sheds? We drive them out and ashamed, we sneer at them using a unambiguously pejorative saying: What crap! ..."

Monika Weychert-Waluszko

 

2009 - Lucim lives on, Center of Contemporary Art, Torun (PL)
2007 - Life is elsewere..., For Gallery..., Torun (PL)

transfusion

Installation transfusion is built of five groups of electronic objects. They consist of LCD displays situated on specially constructed stands with a container for resuscitation liquids stuck out upward (like a drip).

The container with the liquid is movable and reacts to the presence of the spectator. A photoelectric cell starts an engine, which lowers the container and makes the liquid pour into a special cell situated in front of the screen, which results in the effect of flooding the screen with the liquid (resuscitation liquid).

Additionally, the moment a spectator appears in the working area a replacement of video images in the displays occurs. The image of self-immolation of Buddhist monk, turns into a deformed media clutter consisting of contradictory pieces of information: essential and trivial, cruel and pleasant, moving and absolutely silly. The image, which constitutes the point of transfusion hides from the spectator. The whole thing is accompanied by an animation displayed from independent screens displaying the inside of an aorta pulsating disturbingly.

 
2011 - fallout, XX1 Gallery, Warsaw (PL)
2011 - tolerance of error, Otwarta Pracownia Gallery, Cracow (PL)
2010 - The Prague contemporary festival Tina B. - solutions and evolution / platonic lives, Nostic Palace, Praga (The Czech Republic)
2009 - The First International Contemporary Art Fair ArtVilnius'09, Lithuaniar Exhibition Centre LITEXPO, Wilno (Lithuania)
2008 - Machines of desire, Zone of Contemporary Art, Łódź (PL)
2008 - Mediations Biennale - [un]human error, Narod Sobie Gallery, Poznan (PL)
2007 - error_002: perpetuum soundscreen mobile, BWA Studio Gallery, Wroclaw (PL)
2007 - TRANSVIZUALIA 007: MEDIASCREAM! [stymulation-symulation], Gdynia (PL) the main award of the Pomorskie Province governor
2006 - TRANSFUSION_#02 (alfa), Orangery Gallery Center of Polish Sculpture, Oronsko (PL)
2006 - TRANSFUSION_#01 (betatest), ON Gallery, Poznan (PL)

73°51'N 54°30'E

73°51'N 54°30'E are some of the coordinates of a group of islands called New Land situated in the Arctic Sea. My Search of New Earth has started from watching satellite maps using the GoogleEarth programme. The New Land (rus. Новая Земля) – a Soviet nuclear test site, where the largest atomic bomb in the world, able to destroy tens of towns was detonated. The simplest association: Japan – Hiroshima. The distance that divided me from the destination of wandering into the unknown has evoked one feeling – of emptiness. The emptiness following from ignorance, fear of the strange, a huge leap from one’s warm and safe fireside towards the mythical Odyssey of one’s dreams.

The Japanese ideograms denoting emptiness, 虚無 (kyomu), 空しさ (munashisa), 虚 (kyo), 空 (kuu), 空虚 (kuukyo), 無 (mu), 無意 (muimi), processed into a monotonous video image were juxtaposed with a digital image of Tokyo, slowly drawn in 3D by a programme simulating reality. White, standardised blocks were slowly inhabiting the satellite map, slowly because of weak data transfer on the Internet. The picture of my pause before the journey was a picture from a distance, when the optics of vision change and the angles of seeing get a new dimension, the emptiness was filled in with swollen and pulsating form, giving me a permanent sense of stupefaction.

The installation 73°51'N 54°30'E depends on electric power – time of battery living, until of their running on. This work is the first attempt to cope with distance adopted in the face of the unknown and the undiscovered. The white patches of the mind.

special thanks to Aki Wendland and Yasuyuki Saegusa

2009 - Looking for a NEW EARTH, Sojo Gallery, 熊本市 [Kumamoto] (Japan)