Mending the Soul, mending the Body
Artists:
Curator:
Place:
Library Gallery, University of Zielona Góra
Opening: 16 October 2020, 4 pm
Designing the exhibition, I was informed by three fundamental observations or impulses. The first of those – and with the hindsight of half a century already obvious – concerned a fact both statistical and cultural: that the representation of women artists in the entire history of the Golden Grape Exhibitions and Symposiums was modest at best. This imbalance meant that, being able to present in the Biennale only a small fragment of the picture of current artistic potentialities and attitudes, I decided to devote the show exclusively to women artists. Perhaps in the future, in the event’s further editions, it will inspire meticulous critical studies of what was then – during Golden Grape’s nearly twenty-year-long history – ignored art. The New Art Biennale reiterated that pattern, worrying especially when seen from today’s perspective, but the presence of women artists and the energy and specificity of their work contributed to the initiative’s original character. This is a theme I would like to allude to. The fact that all the artists participating in this exhibition are women is by no means an ideological declaration; the key criterion was their preoccupation with the sensual aspect of the relationship between the two elements mentioned in the show’s title.
For this reason, the profile of the selected artists’ activities in the contemporary art discourse, including the contents of their teaching programmes at art schools (Poznań, Szczecin, Warsaw) or at university art departments (Toruń, Zielona Góra), became the second binding agent of this presentation. This is important, also in the context of Zielona Góra, due to the founding, in 1991, of the Visual Education Institute (today the Visual Arts Institute) at what was then the Tadeusz Kotarbiński Teacher Training College. Its establishment was accompanied by a strong imperative to constitute an academic culture based on education in the context of contemporary art. The Institute started operations during the final editions of the New Art Biennale; it was, and partly continues to be, staffed by participants of that event.
The third impulse is personal and has been informed by my own research. It concerns the observation of everyday life: an analysis of interpersonal relationships and man’s correlation with nature. It has been strengthened by reflection of the recent months – the extraordinary time of the pandemic – but an extensive history of achievements in the field of the “anthropology of the private” has contributed to it too. The process of “mending the soul, mending the body” is narrated through the individual and “territorial” stories of the participants, who create their own traces, but also communal ones. The exhibition presents the perspectives of six women – artists and academics – and its purpose is to capture a mode of introspective observation of daily life, personal experiences, one’s own soul-searching as well as the context of socio-cultural changes. In the work of these artists can be noticed an intermingling of narratives relating to the topical discourses of today: ecological, feminist, cultural. What I am interested in is a way of reworking and redefining them, the issue of communication between an artistic statement, which is always individual, and its public reception. The problem of the condition of the soul and body has an intersubjective dimension today; it is a civilizational experience. It also has a subtle gender aspect. A specific language and a personal, almost intimate form of the message determine the originality of these reflections. A search for a visual confirmation of one’s own presence, reflection on coexistence with nature, relationality of action and empathy, reconstruction of forgotten “things,” conceptualization of reality and narrative, references to semantic communications, alteration and “perfection” of physical looks – those are but some of the possible interpretations of the attitudes of the featured artists. All these representations manifest identity and analytical aspects while at the same time participating in a humanistic narrative of empathy and self-awareness.
Most of the works have been produced specially for the show. One exception, and a significant one, given the context, is a work by Izabella Gustowska, coming from the collection of the Museum of the Lubusz Region in Zielona Góra. This work constitutes a “bracket” of historical value and pertinent subject matter. The author of the Relative Similarity Characteristics series was a participant of Golden Grape and of five editions of the New Art Biennale. For more than a decade, she ran innovative drawing and multimedia courses at the Zielona Góra art school.
Mending the Soul, Mending the Body forms but a small part of the overall project of revitalizing the idea of the Zielona Góra biennales and by no means exhausts the issue implied in the title. The creative practices of the featured artists resonate with the context of the present event – the idea of returning to the past and to a past future – while at the same time aiming into the future now designed.