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We (…) live in disturbing times, mixed-up times, troubling and turbid times. The task is to become capable, with each other (…) of response.
Staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present… as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.
(Donna J. Haraway)
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l’êtrangere is proud to present Staying with the Trouble, an exhibition featuring fourteen women artists, to celebrate the International Women’s Month. The exhibition is kindly hosted by Austin Desmond Fine Art until 28 April.
Inspired by a book by Donna J. Haraway, invites us to face our problems head-on, sharing them with others, and finding answers collaboratively. Although the book refers to the horrors of the global effects of Anthropocene and Capitalocene, this is an attempt to adapt the ideas expressed by the author to other ‘troubles’ too, more ‘local’ and personal.
Haraway defines speculative feminism as practice and process; it is becoming-with each other in surprising relays; it is a figure of ongoingness…The author argues that we need each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations; We become-with each other or not at all.
This exhibition attempts to link the disparate threads and ideas of women artists working in different times and geographic locations. This rhizomatic structure of connections takes us through the questions of what it means to be a woman today and how the questions and solutions have been relayed from previous generations. Be it facing the on-going dilemmas of working mothers, dealing with our biological body and unguarded emotions, societal conventions and restraints, it seems that all the ‘troubles’ facing women, are still current today.
The artists in the exhibition address various ‘troubles’ using different media, often the feminine threads of fiber art using crochet, weaving and sawing, objects, performance, film or photography. Some reach out to ancient myths and tales, others to the history of art, ancient societies, science or personal experiences. From overtly figurative and ‘naked’ through modest and subtle to abstract, it is exciting to find the resonance between the artworks that at first may not be that obvious.
The participating artists are Güler Ates, Anna Baumgart, Ellen Friedlander, Anna Kutera, Katalin Ladik, Małgorzata Markiewicz, Anna Perach, Joanna Rajkowska, Su Richardson, Alicja Rogalska (in collaboration with Ana de Almeida and Vanja Smilijanić), Melania Toma, Teresa Tyszkiewicz, Agata Wieczorek, Anita Witek.
Go here to the video tour of the exhibition
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Realised during her residency at the Instituto Inclusartiz in Rio de Janeiro in 2014 [...] this body of work explores the idea of cultural displacement and nuances of political identity as seen through the lenses of the artist personal experience.
[Ates' lone, veiled figures] walk along the streets of Rio carring everyday kitchen objects, evoking a sense of nostalgia and belonging, or a small house, reflecting on the expression “home is where you are” regardless of nation, ethnicity, gender or religion.
(Joseph Marcelle)
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Guler Ates
Ates works across video, photography, performance and printmaking and her practice is always underpinned by rigorous research. Across diverse geographies, Ates's photography traces histories both of self-aggrandisement through appeals to historical precedent and the desire to exoticise and possess the alien other. In Ates' work, the veil embodies its full multiplicity of historical and cultural meanings and uses: not necessarily a hijab or a niqab, neither sari nor wedding veil. Ates makes conscious reference to the European traditions of veiled women, as found in works by Vermeer or Rembrandt.
Residencies and awards include: Eton College Residency (UK, 2015); Instituto Inclusartiz, Rio da Janeiro (Brazil, 2013-2014); Space 118 Residency, Mumbai (India, 2012); Leighton House Museum, London (UK, 2010); The Loft at the Lower Parel, Mumbai and Arts Reverie, Ahmedabad (India, 2009); Fundacion Valparaiso, Mojacar (Spain, 2008); Matthew Wrightson Award (2008); Cité Internationale Des Arts, Paris (France, 2007).
Her work is in numerous significant collections in the UK and worldwide, including: Royal Academy of Arts, Photography Collection (UK); Royal College of Art (UK); the Victoria & Albert Museum, Print Collection (UK); Achmea Kunstcollectie (Netherlands); Ben Uri Gallery and Museum (UK); Government Art Collection (UK); and Museu de Arte do Rio (Brazil).
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I’m tempted by the possibility of redefining the notion of ‘hysteria’, the transformation from an offensive epithet into a compliment. For me hysterics sounds interesting, it’s a synonym of a creative approach of women to the world, a rebellious or even revolutionary stance. Something that feminism has already discovered and analysed on the basis of the 19th century hysteria – it’s a sort of self-art – it has never been accepted in the social consciousness.
(Anna Baumgart)
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Anna Baumgart
Ecstatics, Hysterics and Other Saintly Ladies, 2004, video 10'40"Ecstatics, Hysterics and Other Saintly Ladies (2004) is a story of self-aggression, female fears of loneliness, lack of acceptance, intimate rituals carried out at home.
The video was shown at an exhibition Global Feminisms at Brooklyn Museum NYC in 2007.
In a career that has embraced sculpture, video and performance art, the Polish artist Anna Baumgart has demonstrated an extraordinary versatility in terms of artistic expression. She represents a feminist perspective focused on personal, often hidden, problems and obsessions, also delving into the subject of the "Other". Her works and projects refer to a wide range of issues, although all of them share a preoccupation with repression.
In 1994 Baumgart graduated from the department of sculpture of the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk. In 1995 she received the Award of the City of Gdańsk for the Most Interesting Debut. Baumgart has taken part in the most important shows of Polish art at home and abroad. In 2004 Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw organised her exhibition in tandem with Birgit Brenner. She has received stipends from Fundacja Kultury (2001) and the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (2005). She was awarded the First Prize at LOOP festival in Barcelona in 2011 for her video Fresh Cherries. Baumgart's works are in the collections of Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, the Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts in Lublin, Museum of Art in Frankfurt a/M, and in private collections.
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Anna Baumgart discusses her work during the exhibition Global Femminism at the Brooklyn Museum
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There is little if any sense of pose or artifice, even in the portraits or the extended self-examination Betrayal; Friedlander values the quality of spontaneity perhaps above all other qualities, maintaining the immediacy of the photographic image even while subjecting it to disorder and disjuncture.
(Peter Frank)
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Ellen Friedlander
BetrayalShowing her own body in a series of disrupted images Ellen Friedlander conveys her grief, confusion, anger and distress after learning of a betrayal by her husband. By using multiple in-camera exposures, collage and cutting and re-assembling the photographs, she achieves a powerful, physical manifestation of her feelings and vulnerability.
Ellen Friedlander is a Los Angeles-based fine art and documentary artist who uses a variety of in-camera and post processing techniques to reveal the unpredictable, idiosyncratic, inscrutable nature of the human condition. She uses ideas of memory, displacement, and photographic truths to make the unseen visible. Her work has been most influenced by 20th century street photographers.
Friedlander has exhibited internationally and most recently was featured in Lenscratch, The Hand Magazine, The Candid Frame: Episode #499, as well having her work as the cover photograph for APA-LA OFF THE CLOCK. She lived in Hong Kong for fifteen years prior to settling in Los Angeles in 2018. Her current and updomong exhibitions include The CAMP Modern: The Fragmented Frame (Miami, FL), The Year of Not Knowing (Los Angeles Center of Photography), The Photographer's Eye Gallery (Escondido, CA). Her works feature in prestigious private collections in the USA.
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In the times when the statement made by Donald Judge ‘(...) Anything may be art(...)’ is widely believed in, the criteria of traditional assessment have been weakened. Therefore a new assessment category has been introduced, namely the purposefulness of undertaken work. Consequently, the choice of purpose must be made really precisely with complete awareness and conviction of its appropriateness. A total control and analysis of our own artistic attitude and our artistic activity is the only right method.
(Anna Kutera)
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Anna Kutera
The Undressing SessionThe Undressing is a series of six photographs documenting Anna Kutera’s performative action of undressing. Instead of showing her body, Kutera showed the pieces of her clothes gradually piling up on a chair. The artist appeals to the viewer’s power of imagination to activate the female body in different stages of undress and instead of its direct representation.
Anna Kutera artistic practice includes film, video, photography, painting, installation and performance.She combined her artistic activities with the activities of an artistic community animator. She was active within ‘Conceptual Contextualism’ as a Feminist practitioner in Poland in the 1970s. In 1975-1980, she co-organised the international movement of contextual art, focused on researching contexts of artistic productions, which extended the concepts and patterns of the then-dominating conceptualism.
Kutera has exhibited extensively in Poland and internationally, most notably in Galerie Kunstpunkt (Berlin), Documenta 7 (Kassel, Germany), Guggenheim Museum (NYC), Polish Woman’s Film 1970-80 (NYC), Museum of Modern Art (Sao Paulo, Brasil), Art Museum Gelsenkirchen (Germany), Galerie der Kunstler (Munich, Germany), Fluss Association, Schloss Wolkersdorf (Vienna, Austria), Drents Museum (Assen, Holland), Banff Center (Canada), Artculture Resource Centre (Toronto, Canada), Museum of City of Copenhagen (Denmark).
Her work is in many museum collecitons including: The Royal Library of Art (Copenhagen), National Museum (Warsaw), Centre of Contemporary Art, Zamek Ujazdowski (Warsaw), Collection BWA (Lublin), Foundation DANAE (Paris).Go here to visit the artist page
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In her performance Feminist Painting from 1973 Kutera spread out a large sheet of paper in a studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław. Using a broom that was dipped in black paint, she started to “sweep” the paper in the same way one sweeps the floor to clean it. Her ironic gesture hinted at the societal expectation that women should unconditionally embrace their domestic role. At the same time, as the title gives away, this performance was a critique of modernist painting and Abstract Expressionism in particular. What comes to mind are the sweeping gestures of masculine bravado demonstrated by the likes of Jackson Pollock.
(Viktor Witkowski, Hyperallergic)
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Feminist Painting
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Despair, 2021
'In early March 2020, Romuald died, from mid-March hit the Corona virus pandemic and quarantine, in June I turned 68; in November my 18-year-old cat Rózia died ... I was completely alone!
'My soul was depressed.
'I had to find myself in all of this. Stripped of youth, closeness of a loved one, lonely ... no chance ... as some psychologist put it: people aged 65-75 enter the period of "contextual existentialism".
'I decided to use my dramatic situation and express it in art.(Anna Kutera)
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Katalin Ladik
PoeminKatalin Ladik lives and works in Budapest, Hungary. She begun as a poet, expanding into performances in the 1970s, Ladik’s work revolves around the body, the voice, and phonetic and poetic experimentation. She developed her own theatrical language which eventually came to incorporate sound and visual poetry, performance art, experimental music, audio plays, happenings, mail art, collage, and photography.
Throughout Ladik's work and particularly in her performances, the voice and the body (most often her own) converge to become a site in which the personal and political spheres overlap. Making use of diverse sources from mythic narratives to personal and everyday objects, she has consistently sought to investigate her role as a woman in her own Eastern European context, challenging dominant societal, sexual and gender norms.In 2010 the first retrospective on Ladik, The Power of a Woman: Katalin Ladik, was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina in Novi Sad. Meanwhile internationally her works were shown in the representative gender-focused touring exhibition of MUMOK, Vienna in 2009/2010 titled Gender-Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe. In 2016 Ladik was included in the noteworthy exhibition Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s: Works from the Verbund Collection at the Photographers’ Gallery, London travelling to MUMOK, Vienna in 2017. In the same year Ladik was selected to participate in documenta 14 in Athens. Ladik’s works are in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, MACBA, Tate, and Moma
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Małgorzata Markiewicz frequently supplements the language of clothing with photographs or objects. Aside from this, performance is one of her favorite media, as is often the case with socially committed artists. Clothing is a gigantic branch of industry and a crucial element in the capitalist game. It makes it possible to earn money and win fame. It is therefore hardly surprising that economic speculation in clothing is possible.
(Anna Maria Potocka)
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Malgorzata Markiewicz
CobwebCobweb is a white, lacey dress in the shape of a spider’s web. The artist was inspired by the beliefs of the Hopi Indian tribe who inhabit Arizona, USA. In their mythology, the world was created by Grandma Spider Woman and the culmination of the act of creation was to teach people to weave wicker basket. The artist, pictured wearing the dress, embodies the image of a spider-woman: an aggressor, a protector or a prisoner. The dress also references the myth of Arachne , doomed to weave for the rest of her existance as a punishment for being too creative and too ambitious.
The artistic practice of Małgorzata Markiewicz examines the complexity of contemporary gender dynamics in the context of the home environment and broadly understood society. She uses fabric as a medium, investigating the symbolism and significance of the message of clothing. In her work there is an implied feminist critique of intimations of the body, domesticity, fashion, and craft.
Małgorzata Markiewicz, lives and works in Krakow, Poland. She is a graduate of the Faculty of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow and in 2015 she obtained a doctoral degree there.
In 2012 she was commissioned a public sculpture, a tribute to Witold Gombrowicz, a celebrated writer and playwright, as part of ArtBoom Festival in Kraków. Her works were presented, among others, at Zachęta National Gallery of Art (Warsaw), Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle (Warsaw), MAXXI (Rome), The Photographers Gallery (London), Sculpture Park in Bródno - MSN (Warsaw), Central Museum of Textiles (Łódź), Matadero arts centre (Madrid); Berardo Museum (Lisbon), MOCAK (Kraków), Łaźnia (Gdańsk), The Cable Factory (Helsinki), SPACES (Cleveland, OH).Go here to visit the artist page
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Flowers
Małgorzata Markiewicz initiated Flowers in 2004 as a performative sculpture but conducted in solitude, where the artist strips off her clothes and arranges them in the shape of a flower. This gesture was a response to the conservative and chauvinistic attitudes of the professors in the department of sculpture at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków where Markiewicz was a student. The expectations were for the sculptures to be formal, monumental, made of hard materials that require the use of specialised heavy tools, large studios and physical strength. Flowers subverse and contradict this definition of sculpture by being soft, small, light, fragile, casually and randomly scattered on the ground. They are seductive and playful in their beauty, misleading in their appearance and suggestive in their connotations of a naked woman who just walked out of them. The artist consciously extends an invitation to the game with imagination by teasing the male gaze that in this case was denied the pleasurable spectacle.
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Drawing directly down from lived experience: memories, phenomenologies, social rituals and stories of ‘home’, they re-animate materials/objects with unsettling magic to become performative, unruly, grotesque. These art works defy positions of aesthetic detachment to celebrate art’s agency within what feminist writer Jane Bennett has described as ‘a knotted world of vibrant matter’
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Anna Perach
Frida, 2020Frida is made from three almost identical tufted parts inspired by a pattern of the female torso and hips. The piece's top part ends at the neck line, hinting that the missing head is decapitated. Skulls like heads are placed on the shoulders as army ranks signifying the character's deadly powers. One of the skulls is putting it's tongue out in a red, phallic shape. Contradictory to the dark symbols on the top part of the piece the lower half is flourishing with flower motives and bright colours. The piece is influenced by thoughts about the archetype of the women/mother, a force that is associated with giving life but also with violence and the ability to diminish it. The title Frida is a tribute to Frida Kalo and her symbol as a woman who's art and life capture these themes.
Anna’s practice is informed by the dynamic between personal and cultural myths. She explores how our private narratives are deeply rooted in ancient storytelling and folklore and conversely how folklore has the ability to tell us intimate, confidential stories about ourselves. In her work, she synthesises female mythic characters and retell their stories while placing them in the current climate. By doing so Anna creates an experience of eeriness, evoking a sense of both familiarity and distress. Anna works in a technique called tufting, making hand-made carpet textile which she transforms into wearable sculptures.
Anna Perach completed in 2020 her MFA (distinction) at Goldsmith University, London. Perach took part in many exhibitions in the UK and Europe including Jüdische Gemeinde (Frankfurt, Germany), In Stitches (Larsen Warner, Stockholm, Sweden), Storia Natturna (Centrale Feis, Italy), Plus One (Limbo, Marate Festival, UK) Textus Ex Machina (aqb Project Space, Budapest, Hungary), The Mother Art Prize 2019 (Mimosa House, London). Amongst the awards are Asylum Arts, Sarabande Foundation Studio Award, International Jewish artist retreat, Sharett Foundation Scholarship for Plastic Art. Her works are in many prestigious private collections.
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Joanna Rajkowska explores urban spaces and experiential stories. Her concern is with the regeneration of ‘atrophied’ public spaces and their political and social histories. Rajkowska’s art offers new ways of experiencing space and sociality, whether in Berlin, Warsaw, the West Bank, Turkey, Peterborough, London or Copenhagen. She is one of the most significant women creating public art in today’s art world.
(Maggie Humm)
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Joanna Rajkowska
Light of the Lodge, 2012, performance, video 4'21'''For me, ever since I saw Lars von Trier’s film, Copenhagen has been the city of The Kingdom. The original Danish title Riget also translates as ‘the realm’, leading one to think of dødsriget - the realm of the dead.' The sinister, albeit comedic, masonic rituals depicted in The Kingdom inspired Rajkowska's performative response to the city’s masonic past - a night march of women. A group of women started their walk through the city from the Royal Library garden, one of the most tranquil spots in the city. The choreography of the march functioned as a symbolic transmission of the power of reason and control to those who, according to the hierarchical and male structure of the lodge, are excluded from authority.
Rajkowska works with objects, films, photography, installations, ephemeral actions and widely discussed interventions in public space. Her unique artistic vision and methodology combines subjective narratives and critical discourses with a deeply felt concern for the spaces in which her works appear and the people they touch. Instead of invading or occupying public spaces, she blurs the identities and hidden tensions associated with them, navigating around communal dreams and fears intuitively far from a discursive level which would disrupt the physical and emotional realms involved. Her works resist interpretations which could offer simple solutions to complex problems, instead, they are conceived of as social utopias.
Joanna Rajkowska studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Kraków, completed an MA in History of Art from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, and extended her education at the State University of New York. Her films, sculpture and installations have been exhibited in major museums, international festivals and biennials. Her public sculpture Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue, a 15-meter palm tree permanently installed in the centre of Warsaw, is considered one of the most iconic works of Polish public art.
Rajkowska’s works are in the collection of many institutions and museums including the National Museum, the Centre of Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, and National Art Gallery Zachęta in Warsaw, the MOCAK in Kraków, the Wysing Arts Centre (UK), and Museum Susch (Switzerland). -
Listen. Use my body. Make a series of canned drinks, cosmetics and frozen food from it.Use the body fresh, it's best. First, you have to remove the skin and divide up the body. Cremate some of the innards, keeping the remainder fresh. Some of the organs, glands and bodily fluids must be saved. Don't forget the neurons and the fat. Using these ingredients as a base, prepare carbonated beverages of different properties, later soap, ointment and perfume, finally frozen food. When you've managed to do all this, sell it for good money.
(Joanna Rajkowska)
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Discreet Return (part of Satisfaction Guaranteed)
Satisfaction Guaranteed (2000) is a brand of limited line of products created by Joanna Rajkowska as a reaction to a consumer culture entering Polish society after the 1990, during the country’s transition from a communist to a capitalist economy. They were all produced using existing industrial methods. These products were marketed according to the consumer market rules: they have a logo, a trademark and a carefully designed packaging.
A careful reading of the ingredients listed on the drink cans indicate that they contain the artist’s DNA, the grey matter from her brain, extracts from her breast glands, vagina mucus, bits of the cornea and endorphins. The effects of consuming Rajkowska's products are existential in nature. The drinks, as side effects, stimulate eroticism, kill pain, and cause the mood to mutate into the feeling of "lacking" and boredom. They even are able to transform the consumer’s genotype.
Rajkowska’s project is ironic and borders on the provocative. In reality, the Satisfaction Guaranteed products are not made with her bodily elements. We are simply moving in the area of artistic fiction. Rajkowska presents a certain potential: total consumption beginning with the body itself through to biography and then all the way to the most intimate emotions, all done using the conventions of black comedy.
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A crocheted pillow in the form of a pregnant body, draped over a chair, cleverly merges sculptural elements with craft materials; a ‘menopause mat’ in the shape of a heart has ribbons attached on which are written the multitude of symptoms that accompany the menopause. Fitting her practice around the different stages of the female body – menstruation, pregnancy, motherhood, menopause – and combining this with references to mundane domestic activities, Richardson’s work not only elevates the female body as the prime focus of her practice but also fosters the emergence of craft as the dynamic and expanding medium it is today
(Sabine Casparie)
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Su Richardson
Birmingham-based artist Su Richardson is a pioneer of British Feminist Art and notable contributor to two of the most important art groups of the 1970s - the mail art project 'Feministo' and the feminist art collective 'Fenix.' Known for her celebration, exploitation and subversion of traditional feminine skills such as crocheting, Richardson revalidated craft as a fine art form and took feminist art of the '70s in different directions - fitting her practice around motherhood, work and household tasks. Her humorously subversive aesthetic anticipated contemporary countercultures and movements that combined craft with street art, such as yarn bombing and guerilla knitting, and was a precursor to a younger generation of female British artists who combined visual puns with domestic objects, including perhaps most notably Sarah Lucas in her seminal works Self Portrait with Fried Egg (1996) or Pauline Bunny (1997).
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LARP engages not just the intellect, but also the body and the affects and can be a powerful tool for developing empathy. It is about unlocking child-like imagination, not to be childish, but to be able to see things anew. The purpose of the game is also to create a safe space to experiment with organising and building solidarity between different types of queer-feminist activist groups, which is especially important now, at the time of the revival of the extreme right-wing.
(Alicja Rogalska)
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Alicja Rogalska, Ana de Almeida, Vanja Smiljanić
NOVA, 2020, VideoNOVA is a feminist futurist LARP (Live Action Role Play) written by Alicja Rogalska and Ana de Almeida. In the video, based on the most recent iteration of the game devised in collaboration with Vanja Smiljanić, a group of Vienna-based feminist and queer activists collectively improvise to create a piece of feminist political fiction - a future world free of patriarchal oppression.Due to a structural imbalance of forces, grassroots initiatives are often limited to a reactive position. Fighting against attacks upon their organisations, such as financial cuts or political marginalisation, they are often left with the feeling of being one step behind. Creating a speculative space allows the participants to explore different scenarios, interpersonal relations, affects, desires and organisational ideas free from the sometimes suffocating weight of present conditions and structures that can limit the horizons of political imagination.The game draws on the techniques of psychodrama, forum theatre and improvisation, as well as inspirations from the feminist tradition: from consciousness-raising groups and Suzette Haden Elgin's constructed language to feminist nano-games. Conceived in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, and filmed in October 2020, in between lockdowns, the project responds to the current need to redefine social relations through feminist and queer perspectives.Currently shown as part of Cybernetics of The Poor: Tutorials, Exercises and Scores exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien, curated by Diedrich Diederichsen and Oier Etxeberria (until 28 March 2021). -
Melania Toma’s Uterus Pumpkins series embodies that same push and pull between creation and violence, the varnished pumpkins like a womb from which palm leaves spike out like threatening spheres.
(Sabine Casparie)
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Melania Toma
Uterus PumpkinsThe pumpkins are symbol not only of the feminine - of the warm womb of the earth - but are also associated with the dual concept of resilience/transformation. Patterns and motifs are there to perform a psychoanalytical function on the viewer, to offer a therapeutic dimension which is the basis for a radical transformation of the self. They are a bridge between the ancestral - evoking a lost ideal community - and a possible future. These pumpkins therefore acquire a new range of meanings as places where thoughts, memories and dreams are integrated. They become uterus: incubators of humanity.
Melania Toma is an Italian multi-disciplinary artist living and working in London. At the centre of her practice lies the exploration of the narrative subjectivity - intersubjective we, within historically situated intersecting webs of gender, power hierarchies, ecological degradation. These intersectional analyses include the concepts of feminine, structures of domesticity, and the possibilities of the transformative power of the self. Through the haptic qualities of painting, sculpture and textile art, Toma describes how we create and experience different interconnected worlds human and non-human, material and spiritual. In an attempt to reconnect with her own primitive fragmented energy, Toma creates a world populated by totem-objects: Arpilleras, Uterus-pumpkins, Homunculi and whatever else is capable of sending instinctual messages to the rational side to which we are forced to pay attention.
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Arpilleras
Arpilleras is a series conceived by Toma as a specific tribute to the Chilean Arpilleristas, afeminist movement which arose under the dictatorship of General Pinochet in the years 1973-1989 and proved that a radical transformation of the self through art is possible.
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Teresa Tyszkiewicz
Teresa Tyszkiewicz (1953 - 2020) is author of short films, photographer, draughtsman, performance artist, painter. She studied at the Faculty of Mechanics and Technology at the Warsaw University of Technology. Since 1982, she lived and worked in Paris where she began fastening pins, sometimes covered in thick acrylic paint, cotton, wool, or horsehair, onto canvas, paper, sheet metal, and wood. This poor object became magical to me, the artist once said. The prick, the resistance and the urge to overcome it. Her personal style involved images full of motion and metaphors, with the artist’s body often appearing in the nude, in her performances she explored feminine sexuality. Tyszkiewicz conducted intimate ceremonies in the erotics of organic matter, wrapping her own body in raw cotton, covering it in a mucus-like substance, immersing it in grains, soil, and cooked pasta.
Videos such as Day After Day, 1980; Grain, 1980; Breathe, 1981; and the posthumously debuted ARTA, 1984/2019, follow from the vicissitudes of process rather than a predetermined script. A recent retrospective Teresa Tyszkiewicz: Day After Day, was held at Muzeum Sztuki , Lodz in 2020.
Her works can be found in many private and public collections, in the Fonds National d’Art Contemporian in Paris, in the Musée Ville de Paris and in the Fondation Camille in Paris. -
Exceeding norms and acting beyond visibility almost always foretells significant shifts or even revolutions. As in my artistic practice I have been mostly using photography, I was in influenced and inspired by such artists as Diane Arbus and Nan Goldin. My practice is not limited to photography, while the way when I use this medium is probably more conceptual, post- modern and more concerned with anthropological, economic perspectives. Yet, my intention is the same as the above-mentioned photographers: to bring what is shifted beyond the shared gaze, towards visibility.
(Agata Wieczorek)
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Agata Wieczorek
Agata Wieczorek’s practice combines film and photography while moving between constructed documentary and documented fiction. Wieczorek frequently operates with concealment and visibility, by entering and working with hermetic industries and socially marginalized groups in order to explore unexposed production and consumption of cultural “fetishes” — artefacts that represent the tabooed desires and utopian endeavors with reference to the body, gender and identity.
Wieczorek’s works have been exhibited and awarded internationally, including the Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki; Capa Center of Contemporary Photography, Budapest; Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts (works in collection), Japan; She is the Parallel European Photo-Based Platform 2nd Cycle Laureate in New Artist category and HELLERAU Photography 2020 – Center for Contemporary Arts Residency Award winner. -
The Body
Agata Wieczorek, in the photographyc series, Fetish of the Image, explores the subject of non-binary gender identity. The Masking subculture is a prevalent and hermetic, yet surprisingly popular, worldwide fetish community. Masking is mainly practiced by heterosexual men who employ realistic silicone costumes imitating the female body. Although the idea of entering into someone else’s ‘skin’ may seem merely an erotic, uncanny extravaganza, Masking is rooted in an ideology far from entertainment. In fact, Masking is based on the idea that each human identity consists of two genders instead of only one and understands identity as a matter of individual choice, instead of a bestowed or imposed quality. But as the majority of Maskers identify as men in their daily lives, they do not confront the real consequences of being a woman, such as gender-based discrimination and violence.
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Dressing-Up
It is skin that signalises individual’s identity which criteria – gender, race, age – are frequently employed as fixed definitions that are imposed in order to structure political, economic and social orders. Agata Wieczorek, in the series, Second Skin, combines self-portraits in disguise.
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Witek’s images hold our attention because they insist that the photographic image is not the same as the reality in which it exists, yet into which our mind’s eye is always all too ready to enter. But this resistance isn’t an admonition or a refusal. It is a generative space, in which the lack of easy visual anchors prompts us discover the ‘sense’ of these images. Often this sense might be a feeling, an emotion, or the impression we have of the experience of memory – the paradox of an absence which is also present.
(JJ Charlesworth)
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Anita Witek
Artist and MuseIn 2017 Witek was invited by Leopold Museum in Vienna to take part in a group exhibition, responding to the museum’s collection. Witek decided to look closely at the portraits of Egon Schiele and to explore his relationship with Wally Neuzil, his model and muse. To create the new work, Witek used the posters produced by the museum to promote the exhibitions of Schiele’s portraits, including his self-portrait and the portrait of Wally Neuzil. She cut out the main figures from the posters and left the remnants which depicted the fragments of the painted background of the pictures. She then layered these remnants, arranging them in abstract compositions that suggested the sensual poses taken by Wally Neuzil while modelling for Schiele. The result is a photographic series, Artist and Muse, consisting of the images that have a very sculptural and sensuous feel.
Anita Witek uses found visual material to create collages and photomontages, working with analogue photography. Some of the images take a format of framed three-dimensional photographs, the others are spatial installations that overwrite physical space. Witek’s main interest lies in the subliminal influence of the photographic environment on our perception and memory. She removes the focal points from found images, she then layers these elements on top of each other to create imaginary spaces that she photographs in various stages of the assembly process. By decontextualizing the fragments and transferring them into new, unintended contexts, the artist strives to reveal inherent, latent levels of meaning.
Anita Witek lives and works in Vienna. She completed an MA in painting at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria, and an MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art in London, UK. Amongst many prestigious awards, she received the Austrian Art Prize for Photography in 2015.
Witek has exhibited world-wide and her works are in prestigious public and pivate collections including Albertina (Vienna, Austria), Museum der Moderne Kunst (Salzburg, Austria), MUSA (the Collection of the Town of Vienna, Austria), TBA21 Collection (Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Austria), The Museum of Fine Arts Houston (Texas, USA), Charles Betlach Collection (CA, USA).
Staying with the Trouble
Past viewing_room
