The vernissage will take place on Wednesday, August 3, 2022 at 6:30 pm at the Gallery "Katowice" Union of Polish Artists Photographers Silesian District at 2 Dabrowskiego St. The exhibition can be viewed until August 31, 2022 from Tuesday to Friday from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Free entrance.
Pink does not exist
It starts innocently enough with small, everyday problems. Seemingly strange and insignificant, though difficult behaviors are often explained by adolescence or other emotional or social problems. Constant feelings of isolation, anxiety, fear, inability to cope with simple but daily chores. These are just some of the emotions that accompany the civilization disease of our time, namely depression. It can affect anyone regardless of gender, age, social, professional or family status, and those we love most - our children. Often shamefully hidden from loved ones and the world.
Iwona Germanek is an Artist and Photographer, and above all a Mother, making an attempt to tame the personal experience of her own child's depression through the photographic medium. In the above context, we may wonder whether art is an appropriate tool for addressing the problem of depression and possibly attempting to tame it through her own work? Similar questions arise after viewing the works of Iwona Germanek, although they have also been posed in the works of many prominent artists, most often as an expression of personal struggle with trauma and illness. In a similar context, it is difficult to separate photography and art from life. The same is true of the "Pink Doesn't Exist" project, where we observe the relationship between the Mother and the suffering Daughter. The words of the famous Polish art curator Andy Rotenberg are thus apt: "There are subjects and areas of everyday life that we try not to notice and remember every day. There are artists who unveil this veil to us and say see how some people live that you don't think about. They reach for drastic subjects, because the mission of art today is not to give us pleasure - but to move us and awaken reflection." The " Pink Doesn't Exist" project is a direct reference to the words of the famous curator, and at the same time tackles a problem that goes far beyond art and photography.
Iwona Germanek accompanies her daughter Victoria throughout the process of therapy and the pain of conquering the disease. The mother is the first therapist and faithful companion.
A Mother-Fighter fighting for her child. In the enormity of the experience of fear, pain, anxiety, helplessness and fatigue, the Mother remains the Artist, recording the entire process of therapy and recovery. She observes the therapeutic transformation in Victoria's painted self-portraits. As her health improves, the color palette changes and the color pink appears. Pink that gives hope. As Germanek writes: " ... Black and white deformed body, faces with dead eyes. These self-portraits began to change as therapy progressed. The color pink supposedly does not exist. It is only an interpretation of our brain. But it was this color, like hope, that slowly poured onto her canvases and the grays began to gradually warm up."
Germanek seems to be a modern-day Warrior Woman. On the one hand a fragile and delicate Artist, on the other a strong and tenacious Woman fighting for her daughter's health. This peculiar intertwining of strength and sensitivity results in deeply moving works. The artist uses a whole palette of actions from the borderline of photography and other fine arts. She tells us her story in a very subtle way. She photographs her daughters' artworks, which are created during the therapeutic process. She finds photographs of Victoria in the family archives, where she tries to find the first symptoms of the disease. She includes a moving photograph in her talk, which is a portrait of Victoria created by a miswriting on a digital camera's memory card. She coats the photo of her daughter with wax, wanting to show symbolically the numbness, the inability to contact the world. She pastes Japanese tissue paper over the individual photographs and then scratches Victoria's face out from under the veil of paper, as if she wants to bring her daughter out from under the invisible veil of illness separating her from the world.
Iwona Germanek shows courage in telling us her story. She exposes to the public what many of us would like to hide from the world. She tells an intimate
and dramatic story of struggling with the oppression of her own child's illness. The author leads us through the tangled and inner worlds of Mother and Daughter. Her project is an example of taming a painful experience through art. The photographs are not a flashy manifesto written on gallery walls. They are a message of tenderness and love and the strength of the Mother and the Artist. It's a touching and multi-plotted photographic story about overcoming illness and the inner strength that pushes us to fight.
Krzysztof Goluch
Iwona Germanek
Student at the Institute of Creative Photography in Opava, graduate of the AFA Photography School in Wroclaw and Fotoeducation, member of the Union of Polish Artists Photographers Silesian District. She conducts photography workshops in historical techniques. On a daily basis she is connected with the Municipal House of Culture in Łaziska Górne, where she heads the Alternative Photography Workshop. She is the author of eight solo exhibitions and numerous group exhibitions. She is the winner of the Grand Prize in the 2020 Exhibition at the CCA in Toruń, winner of the first place in the 2020 Unstuck Photography Contest, winner of the honorable mention Vintage Grand Prix of the 6th edition of the Vintage Photo Festival in Bydgoszcz in 2020, Finalist of FRESH 2021, winner of the gold statuette in the London Photography Awards 2022 and the bronze medal in the Chromatic Photography Awards 2021. She is the author of the photography book "Herbarium." In her work, she combines photography with other fields of artistic expression in an effort to establish pictorial intergenerational contact. Her works are in the collection of the Silesian Museum in Katowice.
