EWA ZARZYCKA. I AM NOT ZOFIA RYDET
OPENING: 15 January 2018, 7 PM
EXHIBITION: 16 January – 31 March 2018
PERFORMANCE: 11 March 2018, 6 PM
Ewa Zarzycka’s work embraces the fields of performance, filmmaking, and photography. She also creates written drawings that form a specific kind of visual memoirs. In her early work, Zarzycka focused on photography. Since the 1980s, she has gained renown mostly as a performer and a filmmaker. In 1991, the artist had her first solo show at the Galeria Grodzka BWA in Lublin. Galeria Studio is pleased to present Ewa Zarzycka’s new project I Am Not Zofia Rydet. These short and simple movies are dedicated to friends and colleagues who pose for her at their homes or studios recreating the scenery from Zofia Rydet’s photographic series Sociological Record. Zarzycka pays tribute to the older generation artist, but also shows the limits of photography understood as an objective recording tool. The show also includes the artist’s early work, the series of black and white photos were created when she was a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław mainly in Andrzej Lachowicz’s class between 1976 and 1978. There is a performative dimension to the works since Zarzycka used her camera to record group activities that easily turned into planned or spontaneous artistic actions. In the 1980s, Zarzycka’s interest in film was motivated by the desire to strengthen and develop relationships amongst friends. Two films from that decade, Symptoms from 1980 and Cardinal and a Fat Woman – Makers of Culture from 1985 (together with Tomasz Dobrzyński), were staged and filmed with the help and participation of a small circle of friends with private houses and gardens used as the setting. At Galeria Studio we present Symptoms in a new version from 2017 with today’s commentary from the artist. Ewa Zarzycka’s art thrives on her life and memory. Her activity consists in a peculiar mixture of a diary and a dialogue and it is activated by an ongoing intersubjective exchange.
Curated by Agnieszka Rayzacher and Dorota Jarecka
