WITH THEM: TERESA MURAK / MAGDALENA KOMAR / ALEKSANDRA PRZYBYSZ / KAROLINA ŻYNIEWICZ
Opening: September 18, 2023, 6 pm
The exhibition will be on view Tuesday to Sunday, 12–7 pm until November 19, 2023
On the opening day, at 6 pm starts a performance by Karolina Żyniewicz Bringing to Life: Signs of the Times. Collecting Biological Traces and Memories
This exhibition explores a new area of art – art created with them, others, non-human subjects. In the search for partners outside of our human world, female artists show particular determination. In her book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Donna Haraway describes co-creating with plants and animals in hybrid collectives as sympoiesis. Creating-with is the theme of this exhibition. We invited artists for whom the process of creation is more important than the resulting object, and who treat this process as an expansion of the possibilities of interspecies information exchange, to participate. Two important boundaries are blurred in this activity—the first separating nature from culture, the second a sharp distinction between artist and non-artist. Our exhibition thus questions human certainties such as the separateness of nature and culture, the superiority of man over nature, and the dignity of art. It allows us to look at them with doubt.
The narrative of this show begins with the work of TERESA MURAK, an artist who pioneered her own journey toward interspecies dialogue in the 1970s. In numerous actions carried out in the privacy of her home and studio, as well as performances in the public space, she examined how art could become involved in the cultivation, germination and growth of plants. Plants moistened with water sprouted in her hand, or in a bathtub heated by the warmth of the artist’s body. By means of sympoesis she created a zone of contact. In the exhibition at Galeria Studio, her project Sculpture for the Earth, created in 1974 in the Swedish village of Ubbeboda, is featured, as well as early works on paper from the 1970s.
In 2020, MAGDALENA KOMAR erected a beehive in a suburban garden. According to her, “Buying the hive, setting it up, and placing the bee colony in it was the physical process of constructing a new world.” Her project, which she is presenting at the Galeria Studio under the title Alphabet of Persistence, involves creating fabric/sculptures together with the bees. The starting point was the hexagon, a form inherent to bee construction. The artist interprets this form using felt, silk, metal tubes and beeswax, challenging the bees’ construction capabilities. She is an assistant professor in the Fashion Department at the Faculty of Industrial Design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.
In the work Stickiness, ALEKSANDRA PRZYBYSZ discusses her collaboration with the tea fungus known as SCOBY (Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeasts). Przybysz is a multidisciplinary artist, her practice focuses on humans and their symbolic relationship with an environment, space and inherited memory. She graduated from the Department of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and studied at Escola das Artes in Porto at the Department of Film and Sound Production. The artist investigates the boundary between the human and non-human located in the area of affect, a feeling of revulsion, or fear. SCOBY is a special entity, as it is complex and reactive, changing its texture and smell depending on the external conditions. Her film is accompanied by objects made of a tea fungus as well as photographs documenting one of her performative actions.
The exhibition features a performative triptych by KAROLINA ŻYNIEWICZ, entitled Scenographies of Life, with the subsections: Bringing to Life, Dying, Resurrecting. Żyniewicz received her Master of Arts degree from the Władysław Strzemiński Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź and her PhD in cultural studies from the Artes Liberales Faculty at the University of Warsaw. She carries out art projects in biological laboratories as well as galleries and museums, turning them into temporary research rooms. The artist conducts autoethnographic observations in which research samples taken from her body – a cut-out piece of skin, a drop of blood, a fragment of DNA, microbial swabs – become the starting point of transdisciplinary research. For Żyniewicz, art is a practice of cognition. She draws on biotechnology and bio-medicine, but also on other areas of academic knowledge, such as anthropology, philosophy and sociology.
Curator: Dorota Jarecka
Exhibition design: Paulina Tyro-Niezgoda
Conservation: Martyna Wilkowska
Production: Ewa Grzebyk
Matronage: Biuro Emancypacji
Events:
September 18, 2023, 6–8 pm performance by Karolina Żyniewicz Bringing to Life: Signs of the Times. Collecting Biological Traces and Memories
September 19, 2023, 4–7 pm performance by Karolina Żyniewicz Bringing to Life: Signs of the Times. Collecting Biological Traces and Memories
November, 4, 2023, 3–6 pm performance by Karolina Żyniewicz Bringing, Resurrection: Delectatio morosa