Konrad Żukowski "skeches" / Magdalena Łazarczyk "collages"
BWA Warszawa
Collages
collage on paper, collages on PCV tiles /
2021
In the digital collage series „When I come home I put a fish on top of the shoe cabinet”, the artist arranges photographs of old time palace interiors and wild animals. A monkey sits on a chaise lounge, a goat strolls through an elegant fireplace hall, and a chameleon sneaks on to a bed in a luxurious bedroom. It seems as if the spaces became reposessed by new owners. The collage series is completed by an image of a hippopotamus and a boy with a parrot inside a modern home. The artist colonizes ornate interiors with new inhabitants. We could relate this gesture to the discusion about environment protection – it is nature, that in the end, owns the products of civilization.
Txt: Marta Gendera
WHEN I COME HOME I PUT A FISH ON THE TOP OF THE SHOE CABINET
collages /
2021
ADAPTECJE
kolaż w przestrzeni miejskiej /
2022
In the early seventies of the 23rd Century, a team of archeologists was examining the ruins of the villa “Krokus”, somewhere in the little village of Sokołowsko nested in the Góry Suche, a part of the Sudety Środkowe mountain range. Sand covered its walls and preserved the interior. The villa, most likely, was a residence of some nobleman, perhaps a consul, who certainly was an admirer of art or an art dealer. Within this splendid estate, a linear sequence of rooms opened out to a splendid, glass enclosed, wooden terrace that offered views of the dried-up bed of a stream. When the researchers had cleaned the terracotta walls and put their brushes away, they spotted a faint outline of frescoes, reminiscent of fragments of the sky that got shattered into smithereens, like scattered ruins of a map. The researchers noticed, among those forgotten fragments and shreds, a multiplot tale about life, in which architecture, man, flora and fauna, entire nature and cosmos interwoven and completed each other in new hybrid forms.
Underground, the researchers found a family crypt. Its walls were covered by a flaking paint of a rotten green color. The royal like sarcophagi, with images of the spouses, placed on marble pedestals. The married couple was most definitely childless. However, there was one more sarcophagus in the crypt placed perpendicularly to the consul’s feet. Above a faint inscription, dulled by the time, there was a relief that appeared like a face of a tree. Its large eye sockets spewed, now and then, clouds of smoke. The researchers then realized they were looking at themselves from outside, through an opening in the tree’s trunk. They were observing a situation that must have occurred in the distant past. Nothing was certain anymore. They heard a cracking sound of a snail’s shell crushed under a boot.
BWA Sokołowsko
Curator: Michał Suchora
An Eye is a Hole in the Branch
collages, video, objects /
2021
Collages on PCV tiles, paper, resin
Seemingly there is a problem. I think hard about it, but I don’t know it. I have a sense of it and some ideas about it. I keep looking for it, but it’s nowhere to be found. When I look around, my inner life looks at itself in objects.
There are misunderstandings all around me. It’s all connected to my case, or it has nothing to do with it at all. It can’t decide whether it’s important to me or completely meaningless. I suspect that my surroundings want to tell me something about myself, but they don’t say it directly. For example, the things I look at, or the things I take into my hands — all of this activates something in me, but I don’t know what it activates. It seems that everything has been turned upside down, it makes me feel incomplete. Some terms are reaching me, but they don’t have a clear origin; instead, they have an obvious delay. They predict what is happening, suggest there will be an important event, that the solution is close. They promise much but fail to satisfy. They explicate much but explain little.
There is a problem, that much is certain. I suspect it may not be true, and yet I feel its consequences.
There are entire weeks when nothing happens, and there are moments in which a week’s worth of happening takes place. Not all days look the same. My surroundings are still full of ambiguities, but sometimes there is a chance of a clear change. Sometimes I get the feeling that my surroundings are ready to treat me in a particular way. They still resist, but without much conviction, as if ready to give up. They almost seem to be opening up. It’s as if thinking takes place in the same material my surroundings are made of, in a language I don’t know. And when I look around, I feel a kind of initiation — I don’t know into what yet, but I truly feel it. And when I look at this thing, for example, and take this object in my hands, none of this seems to matter anymore. Everything seems like something that had to have happened to me. And when I look around, I see a growing tendency to agree on distant qualities. Everything begins to associate with everything else, connecting sufficiently. There are no more side motives, it is no longer possible to separate what is on topic from what is off topic. And even when I know I’m mistaking something for something else, I don’t feel like I’m wrong. And even when I see things where they’re not, I’m sure it makes sense.
These are special moments. They never last long. As soon as this sense of self begins to thicken, I stop recognising myself in my impressions. When I look around, everything still appears to me at once, but not together. One feeling encounters the opposite feeling, each one goes in a different direction. Directions stop agreeing, things start staggering. When everything finally starts to connect, it starts to fall apart right away. Everything is so ‘maybe’ already, all around me are only undecided facts, only misunderstandings. I only know there’s a problem, but I don’t even know anything about it.
And so I spend my days looking for something I don’t know. What I pick up is not what I reach for. The problem keeps shifting. Even if I found something, I wouldn’t find anything. The real solution lies somewhere else than I expect.
Text: Łukasz Rodziewicz
Curartor: Magda Kardasz
Venue: Zachęta Project Space, Warsaw
Photo: Anna Zagrodzka, Łukasz Sosiński
The Wing Moved by Fingers
video, collages, objects /
2020
The Wing Moved by Fingers II
wideo projections, objects, instalation /
2020
The Night Of Time is a large - format animation – a collage. All its components make up the unity. Individual forms are not separate, alienated beings, but they rather seem to be made of the same substance. The Night of Time is a gap, a crevice leading to a world covered under the surface of matter, a place existing in accordance with the invariable rules, manifesting on the border of phantasy and materialism, of fable and science. This is a vision of existence outside time. A dimension with no dichotomies: past/future, good/evil, truth/ lie, culture/nature, and everything happens here and now, with “here” being everywhere and “now” being always. This is a declaration of total apolitically, a withdrawal into a world of a utopian notion of a neutral nature immersed in its existence, in which no spells and prophecies can appear because they have no reference point, are inapt, inaccurate. The painting symbolically puts in brackets and cancels what is related to history, exposing the viewer to a cold view from outside time.
The Night of Time
video animation, sound /
2019
A double figure moves through the rooms of a large building. The principle on which this organism is built is unknown. The systematic steps of its four feet are planned in advance. The rhythm and regularity of this simple choreography takes us into a world of rituals, gestures and spells, which take on a new meaning in the present reality, bringing with them a reflection on our shared future.
Twins: Zuza Golińska/ Magdalena Łazarczyk
Duration of the performance - 3hours.
Performance took place at Zachęta National Gallery, Warsaw.
Pictures by Milena Liebe.
Sticky Grass, Itchy Rocks, Swollen Tounge
performance /
2019
Footnote 12: No Medium, Exhibitions Bureau, Warsaw
Curator: Barbara Piwowarska
Footnote 12: No Medium is a project accompanying 10th anniversary of the Faculty of Media Arts (Wydział Sztuki Mediów – WSM) at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. It was organized with the WSM graduates (Olga Kowalska, Magdalena Łazarczyk, Grzegorz Stefański and Maciej Szczęśniak) especially for this occasion as the twelfth episode of the series. The project will be developed in various iterations over the next two years, in collaboration with Casa São Roque – Centro de Arte (CSR) in Porto. No Medium refers directly to the book by Craig Dworkin (2013), in which he examines artistic gestures of reduction, erasure and zeroing, invoking the works of Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Nick Thurston, Ken Friedman and Nam June Paik. Dworkin asks if the work can give up the “medium” entirely. What constitutes the materiality of the medium and the possibility of communication? It turns out that the medium only exists in a social context: in the weave of relationships and actions. In response to the 10th anniversary of the Faculty of Media Art and Dworkin’s treatise, graduates of the faculty prepared new works proposing their own interpretations of mediality.
Magdalena Łazarczyk proposed a visualization of the concept of medium as a node. In the film projection Wieczny jest błękit nieba [The Blue of the Sky is Eternal], the image of a tangled garden hose from which water is trickling, suggests a state of stopped flow. According to the artist, a simple gesture of tightening the hose deprives the medium of what is the most important – the possibility of communication. “A medium deprived of this function, whose metaphor is the hose, turns out to be an empty, looped image of itself, just like the eternally blue sky.”
The Blue of the Sky is Eternal
video /
2019
Exhibition: What Has Remained, MOS, Gorzów Wielkopolski
old,sandblasted metal slide, absolut black granite wheel
https://magazynszum.pl/co-pozostalo-w-miejskim-osrodku-sztuki-w-gorzowie-wlkp/
ONE TO ONE
INSTALATION /
2018
The house stood in a rather remote district which could only be accessed by commuter rail. Built according to current trends, with a simple shape and an unobtrusive location in the landscape, it bore resemblance to a concrete bunker with a glass opening. The interior was almost empty. The man who invited me inside had been looking after that interior for the last two months. After a short reconnaissance – viewing the enormous rooms, each of which featured a single stylish item of furniture, we sat down on the sofa, listening to Terry Riley’s piece Persian Surgery Dervishes and looking at the garden behind the window. At some point, he asked me about my perception of his practice. We knew each other well, so I realised that he was not asking about the outcome of his activities, but rather about the synergy between himself as the producer and the effects of his work. It does not really matter whether he was making glass tables or composing music. I gave no answer, but when he went to the kitchen to fill a container with ice, I thought that the distance between an idea and its fruits was a kind of no man’s land. I asked myself that question: who or what inhabited it – as I was raised on adventure books, I could not make it seem empty even in my imagination. I was moved by the thought of the existence of a neglected space. It might have been because of the piece that we were listening to, its subsequent layers forming an intricate arabesque, that I thought of fear of something as unobvious as void.
When he returned and put the container with ice on the glass table, I wanted to get back to the question and tell him that as makers of tangible things we deprived ourselves of the ability to reflect on that distance. Instead, we sat motionlessly observing of the garden – its shrubs with yellow leaves swayed by the wind. I liked it a lot as I thought that he also must have felt that on his way to fetch the ice: there is a straight line that stretches between the act and the effect, and questions about what is there are tactless questions. It is not because they are unfounded, but because words it is a territory where words deem themselves void, leaving behind a pure space that cannot be appropriated in any way.
Txt: Mateusz Marczewski
No Man's Land
video instalation /
2018
Empty cabinet spaces, just like empty flats, always point to the transient state between the past and the coming, between the exit and the entrance, between the emptying and refiling- the emptiness is always something alien from them. The cabinets, just like interiors of houses, are supposed to be filled - with things, or with life. When we find ourselves in an empty interior, or we look into empty cupboards, cabinets and niches, we begin to notice and read all traces left behind. In the empty space everything is intensified, it gains on meaning and begins to speak. Traces are evidance of the emptiness, deficiency, passing, absence, as Gaston Bachelard put it: " What would be the point of all these images if there was no dual sense? They live at the point where the home and body blend into one."
ON THE FIRST FLOOR ON THE RIGHT THERE IS NO ONE
3 video projection, object /
2015
ON THE FIRST FLOOR ON THE RIGHT THERE IS NO ONE ﹟2
video /
2015
The movie "Model" is based on an octagonal object, with an external site surrounded by sound absorbing foam. The shape of it recalls the Panopticon - the architectural allegory of control, discipline, and all-seeing power. In the middle of the raw interior, one can see a wooden swing, remaining in a gentle motion, as a symbol of an absent body subjected to a constant training using the appropriate techniques, tools and methods. The object, resembling a cage or a prison, suggests only two possible solutions; to escape or to surrender to the required rules.
The film is inspired by story of Ota Benga- a teenage boy brought from his homeland in central Africa and displayed like an animal at the Bronx Zoo in New York City, New York.
Duration: 02:04
model
video /
2014
The work "By Heaven and Habit" consists of five black - and - white photographs taken in an analogue technology and printed digitally. The series was inspired by the photographs originated from the beginning of the 20th century, depicting the extinct tribe of Fuegans - the indigenous inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego. In accordance to their traditional ritual ceremonies, Fuegans used to cover their whole bodies with geometrical patters, using five natural dyes, introduced to my work as the colours of the wooden frame of each photography.
Fuegans, as we can see on the ethnographic documentation, had the extremely distinguished aesthetics sense, which appear to be delightful even from the perspective of the modern times. The unique and admirable aura of the images - remote and very near at the same time, have inspired me to create my own "tribe" with its own visual code of identification. In my work I have referred to the idea of home as the place, where things and objects of various purposes play the different roles in one`s everyday activity.
As the heroes of my "tribe" I have decided to portrey five young, handsome men standing in the pathetic poses, and equipped (endowed) with the attributes, associated with the home. Liberated from their assigned functions and even from the symbolic meanings, the common objects, like the mirror, the chair or the shelf , influence and change the image of the men. We start to perceive them as the wanderers - the nomads or, on the other hand - the warriors, ready to fight and to defend. Things, which create the "tribal" disguise of my heroes, can serve as the magical or as the practical objects, they can help to survive or to lead the war. The coexistence of these two different spheres of our life - the sphere of sacrum and the sphere of profanum emphasizes the "tribal" aspect of my photographs, opening us to a variety of contexts related to the fundamental for our everyday experience relationship: man - object.
By Heaven and Habit
photography /
2015
“Inanimate objects are always correct and cannot, unfortunately, be reproached with anything. I have never observed a chair shift from one foot to another, or a bed rear on its hind legs. And tables, even when they are tired, will not dare to bend their knees. I suspect that objects do this from pedagogical considerations, to reprove us constantly for our instability.”
Zbigniew Herbert, Objects
"Functions", a series of photographs was inspired by the objects from my everyday environment. Cut out from the background of everyday life and deprived of their proper context, they create configurations that have nothing to do with their traditional "functions". Like actors on stage, they play new roles, which were assigned to them, which we all subconsciously identify with.
Balancing on the border between sculpture and photography, the "Functions" series perpetuates moments, in which juxtaposed items remain not only in a state of physical balance, but also relation and intimacy, evoking associations with well-known situations, behaviours and emotions. Photographs defy the order of the world of objects, which Zbigniew Herbert mentions in his poem, while its irrational interference reminds us of our own "inconstancy”.
Functions
photography /
2014
Duo with Zuza Golińska, Arsenal Gallery, Bialystok, 2017
Curator: Tomasz Pawłowski
The hero of the dual-channel video presentation, the centerpiece of the Invisible Wall exhibition by Zuza Golińska and Magdalena Łazarczyk, is a young adept of traditional martial arts. He performs a sequence of movements that form the basis of training in his discipline. But he has no weapon or armor, and his movements are slowed.
Guard. Attack. Dodge. Deflect. Guard.
This contemlative choreograhy of combat builds the tension that accompanies a duel. But there is a aradox in that tension, for the hero is fighting his own reflection- a type of alter ego, maybe an avatar or a role he is laying. Although the characters wear clothing of diffrent colors, it is imossible to say which of them is real. The constantly susended combat blurs the boundary between what is real and what is virtaul.
But the struggle goes on.
Guard. Attack. Dodge. Deflect. Guard.
The hero of the exhibition seems helpless even as he fights. His effort, connected to the chivalrous ethos of competition, is based on tedious self-improvement and learning respect for others. Being in the center of this duel, we become immersed in a world of internal tensions, in which the forces of duty and rebellion clash. An invisible wall, a duel between noble self-discipline, our inner path, and the oppressive model imposed from the outside.
Guard. Attack. Dodge. Deflect. Guard.
The exhibit's spatial configuration resembles the cult Pong game. Its characteristic sound also appears in the audio created by the artists. The simulation of a ping-pong game, released by Atari in 1972, was one of the first video games to achieve commercial success and contribute to the development of the video game industry. It gained popularity thanks to its simple but extremely engaging rules, which are based on the basic mechanisms of competition and gratification of success.
Invisible wall- a boundary in a video game that limits where a player character can go in a certain area, but does not appear as a visible obstacle. The term can also refer to an obstacle that in reality could easily be bypassed, such as a mid-sized rock or short fence, which does not allow the character to jump ovet it within the context of the game. Designers might add invisible walls on cliffs to keep characters from falling off. If a player character passes through a wall, they may enter an area of the game not intended fot their use.
.....
txt. Tomek Pawłowski
Invisible Wall
video instalation, performance /
2017
Flowers and potted plants fill the space between inert objects and people as they are neither a thing nor a living being. In our relationship to them our anthropomorphic way of thinking is revealed: we see in them life to which one should pay particular attention and we feel the need to nurture this life. If it is true, do flowers, in their specific way, feel our presence? Do they sense human energy, movement, scent or do they hear a voice?
The photographic project ‘Flowers’ consists of an attempt to get closer to this exceptional relationship. The housing ‘Za Zelazna Brama’ (‘Behind the Iron Gate’) in Warsaw, with dozens of its almost identical blocks of flats, revealed to me an endless maze of corridors and staircases in which, paradoxically, an oases of potted flowers and plants seem to remain the only sign of live. Perhaps, small apartments ran out of space for them or someone may have had the fancy idea to create there a substitute of his own garden. Lonely plants are a mysterious counterpoint to life pulsing behind hundreds of anonymous doors. On the raw geometrical background of corridors, these flowers look like exotic and peculiar ornaments. I try to fix on my photographs silence, calm and extraordinary beauty that emanate from them.
text: Michał Suchora
BEHIND THE IRON GATE
photography, /
2015
TOTEMS
collage /
2016
MUSEUM DER MELANCHOLIE, ALFA DEPARTMENT STORE, POZNAN, 2015
The work presented at the Poznan Museum of Melancholy consists two elements: a black cat on the ceiling drawn with the soot of a burning candle and a black and white photograph.
The smoky mark refers to the gesture of marking your presence in places that belong to no one: staircases of huge tenement houses, basements, empty buildings, underground passages below bridges and overpasses. Transferring this “anarchistic” gesture on the last floor of the abandoned Alfa Building in Poznan achieves a dual meaning.
The black circle can be read as a hole in the ceiling, crossing into another dimension, a way of escaping from our current path, outer space, drawing us in. It is a critique of the potential ignored by the city of Poznan treating the ALFA building as a memory of old times.
Using a candle and it’s soot refers to the blackening of pieces of glass that allow us to look directly into the sun.
Leaning against the wall, the black and white photograph presents a figure wearing a welding mask, as protection from the harmful light.
The photograph is presented behind graphite glass, darkening the image further.
SIMPLICITY OF THE UNKNOW FUTURE
drawing, photography /
2015
magdalenalazarczyk@gmail.com