27.01.2023 (Friday), at 18:00 / S. Staszic Museum, Pila, 18 Browarna St. / The exhibition will be on display until mid-March 2023
Meditations on the way to the Holy Lady
"Holy Lady" by Piotr Speka is a somewhat confusing exhibition, built from frames that cannot be easily and unambiguously read. One can guess what is written on them, because the author does not hide the content of individual images, but to what reflections it leads is not obvious. He gives the viewer some freedom in interpreting. He recognizes that everyone has his or her own baggage of experiences that hint at something, so he or she will find an individual way to arrive at reading the signs and gently hinted messages. After viewing the whole, definitely coherent set, however, a camouflaged reflection becomes apparent. It's urging us to stop if only for a moment in the flow of everyday life to think about our being here on earth, from our very beginning to the complete end, and especially about the meaning of that being. It is a story that is not straightforward, without naming the successive stages of the journey through life, but inviting us to think about these, usually several decades, of existence among the human family.
We appear quite suddenly. We emerge from darkness and warmth into a completely unfamiliar space, called the world. It is usually much colder than the one we came out of. At first we have no idea what happened that we are, or where we came from and what was our true beginning. We are, but completely dependent on those who take care of us. This is how the first years pass - a time of innocence. Slowly we learn that we are part of a generational continuity. Someone had to be there before for us to be there too. The worst part is that we don't know why we are here and usually don't find out until our end. We just go on continuing our existence day after day. Beside us are others, and with them, in harmony or without, we build coexistence with people and the world at large. We fill each day with repetitive rituals to affirm this need for us to be. Most of us, in the constant rush of responsibilities and other activities, don't think about what it's all for. The important thing is that we are. That is enough. Locked under the cloak of duration, we reach the end further without knowing if it was worth it. Did our presence really bring something to others who were there at the same time, but surely with us or others, or just for ourselves? And there comes a moment that we don't allow ourselves to think about. We disappear, we are no longer there. It can be a sudden disappearance or slow in pain and imperfection.
We leave the family of man like everyone before us and probably like everyone after us. What remains after us? Offspring, if we managed to bring it about, and some objects and some junk, the sorting out of which must be handled by those who will be after us. Will they mean anything to them? We have disappeared like billions of others. We may have managed to do something for the sisters and brothers of the human community in our lives, some trace of this will remain in books, encyclopedias and other collections of news from times gone by. But there is no obligation to be someone "important", what then remains of us?
In fear of being forgotten, people have created spaces to commemorate our presence on earth. These are stone, earth, metal and sometimes still other forms and places to store our remains. Monuments to our existence. We count on this path to remain, if only as a memory etched in stone. Some hope that there will be something further. For now, no letters confirming its existence have arrived from this supposedly better world. So maybe it's worth the time given to us to live here on earth with meaning and awareness that we are just a tiny seed co-creating the vast universe.
Piotr Speka's exhibition is a visual invitation to look at one's life with reflection, so that it is not only the flimsy ashes that remain behind us. As history teaches us, our grave, which is the link between the living and the dead, will also someday crumble or be dismantled, because no one wants to pay for the permanence of this illusory object of memory.
Andrew Zygmuntowicz
Holy lady - rehearsal one
The presented exhibition is the result of several years of "photographic pondering", in which I tried to answer questions about what is on the other side of the curtain of the theater of life??? how the memory of those who have already passed to the other side affects us and our lives??? why did we show up in the world ?????????
The questions that arose and are arising in the author's mind are numerous and they "multiply" with each day and each life experience.
There were many presentation concepts for the exhibition, and none seemed adequate to convey the emotions that accompany attempts to answer basic and fundamental questions.
Today, on my first attempt to exhibit and invite you to a discourse on the Holy Lady, I know that this is an unfinished topic and is only a hitch/recognition, after several years of pondering.
As a kind of conclusion, let me quote a statement by philosopher Professor Leszek Kolakowski, which best captures the complexity of the issue but also organizes and universalizes the story of the Holy Lady.
On four knots supports this house, in which, pathetically speaking, the human spirit dwells.
And these four are : REASON GOD LOVE DEATH
And the vault of the house is TIME, the most ordinary reality in the world and the most mysterious. From birth, TIME seems to us the most ordinary and tame reality. (Something was and is no longer. Something was this way and is different. Something happened yesterday or a minute ago and can never, never come back.)
It is therefore time's most ordinary reality, but also the most frightening. The four entities mentioned are our ways of dealing with this horror.
The ROZUM is to serve us to detect eternal truths, resistant to TIME. GOD or ABSOLUT is that entity which knows neither past nor future, but contains everything in its "eternal now." LOVE, in an intense experience, also divests itself of past and future, and is the present concentrated and exclusive. DEATH is the end of that temporality in which we have been immersed in our lives, and perhaps, we guess, the entrance into another temporality about which we know nothing (almost nothing). All the brackets of our thought, therefore, are tools with which we free ourselves from the frightening reality of TIME, all of which seem to serve this purpose, to make TIME truly tame.
Leszek Kolakowski, 2004
Piotr Spek / excerpt from the author's text, exhibition catalog
Piotr Spek - Born in 1969, associated with Pila since birth. Graduate of the Poznan University of Technology. Presented his works at more than 20 exhibitions and photographic events. Organizer of photographic life, curator of exhibitions, open-airs and events related to visual arts. Member of the Union of Polish Artists Photographers.