3.03-21.04.2023 / Bydgoszcz Art Center Jagiellońska 47 St.
The exhibition will open with a talk led by psychotherapists Maria Szuster and Elzbieta Marchlewicz: "Moves in the Waiting Room - the meeting of art and psychoanalysis." We invite you to attend on March 3 at 7 pm.
Excerpt from curatorial text:
(...) The cold blue light turns the gallery space into a sterile place of waiting. It is divided by a curtain of soft pom-poms, each string terminating in a concrete weight. Along the windows stand plates with faded portraits balancing on bars. On the other side of the room one can sit while waiting to enter the study. Fuzzy negative portraits stare from the walls. A sign informs you that this is the office of Dr. Kamila Kobierzynska. Using her title of art doctor perversely, the artist impersonates a specialist in a field symbolized by the combination of brain and eye. An older woman's voice comes from the office.
The story we want to hear, unwillingly, is that of Gienia - a character Kamila Kobierzynska has been researching for several years. Gienia is the artist's grandmother, who provided the exhibition not only with the subject, but also with the materials for the works. And literally, because the portraits are developed on light-sensitive silver emulsion-coated plates and iron salt-sensitized silk from her collection, and the faces of the people looking at us come from negatives of photographs of family gatherings from the 1950s and 1960s found in her albums and envelopes. Gienia's extraordinary collection only saw the light of day after her death. This is what the artist says about the discovery: "The things left behind by Gienia spoke more than she did. It should be noted that it was a lot of things for a person living modestly - she simply accumulated luxury goods, locking them in rooms where no one was allowed to enter, hiding them in rooms-chests. A distinctive house with a smell of dampness, full of trinkets and chipped crockery, clocks chiming a dozen minutes at a full hour, decorated with wallpaper from the 1960s - this was just the top layer under which we found a second life - Gienia's parallel, rich life. Paradoxically, there were few photos in these hoards, she built relationships with objects, she liked to know that they were - they were counted and entered in the inventory, but never used." This disturbing discovery led the artist to a search motivated by a desire to understand Gienia, and thus to explore both her and her sense of identity (...)
The generation that survived World War II passed on to their descendants in their genes fear and trauma, the source of which often remains unknown. "Small" personal stories often remain untold, whether due to the shame of the tellers or the lack of interest of the listeners. The story of Gieni's traumatic wartime experiences became known only after her death (...) Through memorabilia and stories, it is possible to form a bond with ancestors, even those we never met, but their experiences were reflected in our genes. Recent years have reminded us how important the community-forming role of culture is. Art allows us to explore memory in all its nonlinearity and subjectivity - and gives us a chance to incorporate our experience into history.
curator: Natalia Pichłacz
Kamila Kobierzynska is co-founder of the Latent Images Studio at the Photography Department of the University of Arts in Poznan and the Photography Studio at the Zamek Cultural Center in Poznan. She is a board member of the Scientific Society of Photography. In 2021 she defended her doctoral thesis "When the Cherry Blossoms. Postmemory and the Transmission of Trauma" at the University of Arts in Poznan.