02 May 2012

Objects and Disintegrations at Gdansk City Gallery

The exhibition Objects and Disintegrations presents artists whose work references the reconstruction, reorganisation and disintegration of forms and objects and their relationship to language, and also the process of translatability.

In a certain way, this translatability is stretched through time and space, locating individual senses between the fragmentary and the whole, unity and diversity, order and chaos. By changing the order of things, it demonstrates and activates the dynamics of different trajectories, sets, configurations and analogies. It suggests the parallel fragmentation of reality, memory, imagination, actions, passions and differences; it dismantles something that once seemed to be whole and also sets borders – contours of certain fragments. It uses a time and space that functions in-between, often underlying the temporary nature of the state of disorientation.

In the movie The Real Reason for the Migration of European People to the West, Cristina David concentrates on changing and mutable categories of time – precisely on the differences that have more or less definite consequences. A Guide to Insults and Misanthropy explores the double meaning of language and in this case, the actual meaning of a flower composition. Referring to the accepted form of communication in the Victorian epoch when negative feelings couldn't be expressed openly, Maria Laboda's bouquet of flowers represents a set of certain offensive contents. Then Cynthia Marcello presents the movie Crusade, in which she depicts fragments that build up the complete composition in a visual way. In Object and Disintegration (The Object of Three), Falke Pisano concentrates on the transformation of the actual form of a sculpture or installation into a form of conversational or narrative description, as in her other works. Pisano questions the relationship between the abstract object and the viewer, drawing attention to the multitude of subjective possibilities of reception and the limitations within the interpretation of artworks. Agnieszka Polska tries to reconstruct one of Włodzimierz Borowski's performances using the form of a visual narrative. In the movie Sensitization to Colour, subjective relationships appear to be a comment on the 'archaeology' of artworks and the possibility of their reconstruction. In her series of collages entitled Remains, Kama Sokolnicka creates new visual stories from fragments of original contexts. The whole of the compostion happens to be different to the collection of the elements themselves.

The artists devote special attention to the precise moment an object's status or meaning changes and also to the performative process of the changes that occur. This continuing possibility of change or exchange allows the constant negotiating and renewing of our conventional communality of meanings and experiences.

Patrycja Ryłko