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Areas of Uncertainity/Who is Janina Węgrzynowska?/Studio Gallery 16.01-12.03 2023/BWA Bydgoszcz 23.03- 21.05. 2023

 




                                                                                                  fot. A. Zagrodzka


Obszary wątpliwości to linie wyginające się pod wpływem różnych napięć. Piętrzą się, układają, moszczą, próbując się dopasować. Tworzą chwiejne układy mobilnych kształtów, które  ze względu na łatwość w przemieszczaniu, stają się tymczasowe. Ruch je napędza, ruch je zmienia, ciało je performuje i przekształca. Praca ma charakter medytacyjny. Powtarzalność tworzy pętle, wspomnienia zapisują się w układach przestrzennych. 

Myślę o pracowni Niny Węgrzynowskiej. Myślę o niej od chwili, kiedy po raz pierwszy zetknęłam się z jej archiwum w 2013 roku. Obsesja ruchu, o której ciągle mówiła zamieniła się w bezruch. Proces twórczy ustał.

„Dużo tego”- pomyślałam wtedy i zabolała mnie ta myśl, odbiła się ode mnie i  własnej pracy. Moje w archiwum jest w procesie tworzenia, dziania się. Nieuporządkowane i w podróżach. 

Od tamtej pory szukam punktów odniesienia, prowadzę niewidzialny dialog ze zmarłą artystką. Czytam jej słowa zapisane w pamiętnikach. Śledzę pracowniane rytuały i magiczne praktyki zaklinania rzeczywistości. Odpromienniki, wróżka, zmywanie podłogi przed pracą. Szukam dopasowań w zakrzywiających się w napięciu liniach. Linie zamieniają się w horyzonty, tajne, trudne do rozszyfrowania pismo.


Fragmenty dzienników Węgrzynowskiej:


9.VIII.1974.

Włóczyłam się trochę, wystawa w Pałacyku na Chmielnej zamknięta, w Desie oglądałam obrazy, które sprzedają artyści, bo bardzo bym chciała jakieś pieniądze zarabiać twórczością. Kupiłam jedzenie na niedzielę, głowa mnie rozbolała bo pogoda dziś okropna i pewnie z głodu. Wreszcie przyjechałam do pracowni: zjadłam, zażyłam proszek na głowę i posprzątałam pracownię. I tak się zrobiła 7 wieczór, pora wracać, skończyć pranie w domu i posprzątać kuchnię bo przed południem nie zdążyłam.

6.I.1975

Prawie pół roku minęło od ostatniego pisania. Najważniejsze co się wydarzyło to to, że zaczęłam malować. Konarska po powrocie z urlopu nie dała mi plansz, powiedziała, że na razie nie ma, że zadzwoni , nie zadzwoniła potem na wrzesień wyjechawszy do Kołobrzegu po powrocie zaczęłam malować na konkurs „artysta i przestrzeń” do Poznania, jeździłam do Inowrocławia gdzie przeprowadziłam ekshumację i przeniesienie zwłok ojca do Warszawy tak jak chciała mama. 

25.V.75.

Słowik wymówił mi pracę w Argumentach. 3.V wezwał mnie na rozmowę i powiedział, że to kres moich możliwości twórczych. Mnie na te słowa szlag trafi, wygarnęłam mu jak mnie traktował i jakie ma prawo tak do mnie mówić.


1.XI.75.

Byłam na cmentarzu. Strasznie zmarzłam. Potem przyjechałam do pracowni, zjadłam, trochę pomalowałam i za chwilę znowu wracam do domu.

25.XI.75.

Jestem potwornie zmęczona. Dyżur był zupełnie obłędny. Zarobiłam wprawdzie 9.tys ale do dziś nie mogę się pozbierać.

29.I.76.

Po ostatnim dyżurze długo tym razem dochodziłam do siebie, nie mogłam w ogóle zabrać się do malowania. Dopiero ten tydzień maluję. A za parę dni znów do pracy. (…)

Od pół roku, kiedy to pracuję w Telewizji dopiero w tym tygodniu zaczęłam projektować nowe obrazy. Do tej pory kończyłam stare albo robiłam wg dawniej zaprojektowanych szkiców. 

4.01.1981.

Przeglądałam tamto słabe pisanie i myślę sobie ile czasu minęło jestem o 5 lat starsza, a moje życie to taka krzątanina wokół codziennych spraw, tak jak wtedy dziś znów jestem po robocie do Kobry „Anatomia morderstwa”, tak zmęczona, że od paru godzin nie jestem w stanie zabrać się do malowania. Powinnam już przywyknąć  do tego, że trzeba odpocząć i dopiero wtedy ale to niecierpliwość, że czas ucieka, że ciągle nie znalazłam tego, co chciałabym zrobić w moim malowaniu, że wreszcie koniec i można by było pomalować a nie można. I końcu próżny mój upór, żeby wczoraj skończyć aby dziś mieć dzień dla siebie.







KADUK/ESCHEAT/Fundacja Archeologia Fotografii/Warszawa 26.10 - 2.12.2018






                                                                                                            fot. A. Hornik


Escheat                                                                                                  

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column

—T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”

In 2017, the Archeology of Photography Foundation (FAF) had the opportunity to work with an extraordinary collection of photographic portraits in the possession of the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute (JHI). Nearly 500 glass negatives from the 1930s were restored and catalogued by the two cooperating institutions, both based in Warsaw, and then made available online via the Virtual Museum of Photography (FAF) and Central Jewish Library (JHI) web portals. Little is known about the photographs or their provenance, including the names of those portrayed or of the images’ author. The negatives were dropped off at the Jewish Historical Institute many years back, their destination likely purposely chosen, for the individual donating them was surely aware that in the Institute’s care were the Ringelblum Archive as well as a plethora of testimonials and other documentary material pertaining to Jewish life in Poland. The chosen repository for the collection thus guided its interpretation—we can surmise that at least a significant portion of those portrayed had Jewish origins (the images themselves contain visual clues as well); and, inescapably, that many of those photographed in the 1930s would not have survived the next decade.

Concurrently in the spring of 2017, as in Warsaw a FAF conservator removed dust and soil from the negatives, trying to piece together and make whole fragments of shattered glass, the artist Magdalena Franczak, in Jerusalem, where the exhibition The Day When Nothing Happened was set to open, assembled her Broken Column, a “collaborative” sculpture consisting of a teetering tower of ceramic dishes which, at the artist’s request, had been brought to the gallery, including by complete strangers, and left to be included in the Column. When the exhibition closed, the individual components of the sculpture—bowls, mugs, vases—were packed up, wrapped in newspaper and cushioned by bubble wrap. They were also assigned numbers, like artifacts unearthed during an archaeological dig. Then, from September 2017 to May 2018, the sculpture, in pieces and literally piece by piece, was transported from Israel to Poland. This was accomplished with the help of the many individuals who volunteered to carry elements of the Column onto airplanes in their suitcases and hand luggage. Only three pieces were lost in the process.

When we invited Magdalena Franczak to participate in FAF’s ongoing Living Archives project—an attempt to reanimate historical archives by commissioning living artists to interpret conserved material through active practice—she told us about the Broken Column. The symbolic meaning and resonance of a shorn column, appearing most often in the context of gravestones—be they Christian, Jewish, or anciently polytheistic—and symbolizing an interrupted life cut short unexpectedly, struck us with acute intensity when considered against the context of the JHI’s anonymous portraits of prewar Polish Jews. The artist reassembling in FAF’s gallery a “column” that serves not as an architectonic source of support but rather, through its assemblage out of shatterable ceramic, as a metaphor for impermanence, centered attention on the spire’s precarious material structure. The materiality of objects is additionally emphasized by the display of brittle glass-plate negatives swaddled, post-conservation, in protective envelopes of cotton paper. She also sculpts porcelain archival envelopes, decorative micro-forms, which patiently await the undiscovered positive prints that may exist somewhere else.

Franczak’s exhibition is, however, concentrated primarily upon individuals—those who carried to Poland the dishes and vases from her Jerusalem exhibition; and the anonymous subjects whose prewar portraits found refuge in the archives of the Jewish Historical Institute. “In this symbolic way,” Franczak says, “the living bequeathed dishes to the deceased, setting them in the material world and placing the people around an invisible table in the tenement house at ulica Chłodna, a customary meeting place for looking at photography albums and family photos.” However, this is not a table to which one can pull up a chair, and these photographs are separated from their “families.” They have no descendants. They are, in a sense, like an estate without a legal heir, subject to escheat, although the JHI serves as the archive’s foster protector. Notes literary theorist Roma Sendyka, puścizna, the Polish equivalent of the archaic “escheat,” definitionally doubles as a description for emptiness as in empty, barren expanses—as well as, for example, the “voidness” of an abandoned residence left in a state of neglect and legal limbo after the death of an heirless inhabitant. Such anachronistic juridical terms, Sendyka writes, “allow us to reconstruct the cultural and legal tradition behind both nationalized campaigns of expropriating estates from wartime deceased and individual acts of dispossession. The appropriation of something by ‘someone who is not entitled to it’ is not a spontaneous act but one that is regulated—by practice and institutions.”

Magdalena Franczak avoids exploiting the JHI collection; she does not appropriate the material, nor does she claim, by artistic escheat, authorship of it. She embraces its emptiness—a void of corroboratory data—filling it, like a vessel, with the potentiality of a living and breathing contemporaneity. The images she chose to frame and hang, printed from the glass negatives, appear as if they were snapshots of the artist’s long-lost friends and acquaintances, with her collages resembling photo-booth strips. A lack of biographical information about those depicted requires us to scour the images for germane details; and every last speck of information that allows us to “find out more about” is at a premium. We take note of badges, Hashomer Hatzair scout uniforms, summer outfits and winter outerwear. We seek out the “familiar” faces of reappearing subjects, who, in a short time, become almost like old friends to us (as they perhaps were to the photographer). In the process, we also consider the conventions of portraiture; in this case, the portraits always en face, suggesting that many of them were made for the purposes of identification documents. The artist frees the material from solely historical interpretations, leading us away from such analytical limitations through her works: a column, collages, porcelain forms, and a table. It is thanks to these complementary creations that we do not merely regard the portrait collection as fossilized. Instead, we focus on its rediscovered beauty. And the potentiality of its void.

—Karolina Puchała-Rojek




(trans. Stefan Lorenzutti and Joanna Osiewicz-Lorenzutti)

12 Stories/Atelierhaus Salzamt/Linz/2018

The "12 Stories" project is an attempt to visually tell the narration entrusted to the artist. Entering the local community of Linz, built of people of all ages, gender and cultural roots, from the position of a person coming from outside world for a short period of time. The artist becomes a kind of medium, listening to 12 stories of various people, referring to the photographs that they bring. Each of these stories will enclose in a collage, that will become the only kind of registration. Without a sound recording or notes – each of the stories will be remembered and visually elaborated by the artist after hearing it. People invited to the project are residents of the city of Linz, who want to share with the visiting artist their story – a story that, through a collage created in a later process, will connect those two strangers for a moment.


Luksus Niewygody/BWA Katowice/ 12.05-12.06.2016










Here is how Magdalena Franczak explores the structure of a home. She seems to be re-creating its timeline, wherein vivid memories become intertwined with guesswork and fantasy. The home’s complex structure, converted into ascetic collages, resembles a map with a removed key. What we can see are only faded paper folds and creases, uneven strips, protruding rounded elements that have come unstuck from the surface and interlocking shapes.
According to Franczak, the map of an ideal home is certainly not some liveable-in convenience, but a thick, cozy nest, a soft body with sagging walls and narrow, velvety passages; a cluttered, messy space, which the artist slices across to make sections to reveal its various layers, patiently peeling away its outer skins as if it were an onion. She peels off the wallpapers and peeps under the carpets, looking out for dusty hiding places, reaching deposits rich in history, borrowings and lash-ups. She seeks an algorithm for this structure’s growth. Her collages attempt to catch the very moment when a piece of architecture becomes domesticated, appropriated, attuned to the bodies of its inhabitants.
Just like in her other works, Franczak combines memory, imagination and blind fate with the vigilant, analytical mind of an anthropologist. It is possible to hear distant echoes of rituals for space clearing, building and assuming responsibility for one’s home. The building becomes a continuation of one’s body, reflecting its experiences, and participating in the most important moments of one’s life. Franczak describes these rituals by means of geometrical paper cut-outs. She describes these forgotten rituals on a piece of paper from a yellowed notebook that she has found in an attic. In these hastily-made notes, she goes back to some old refrains, whose slightly deformed, altered forms keep repeating in her memory. In the past, before people settled in their new place, they let a bird or another animal stay there for the night, so that all the evil forces would settle in their bodies instead, and to protect the future inhabitants. When moving into her new home, a bride had to touch the stove. Before childbirth, cupboards and chests had to be left open. To protect it from evil forces, the building was perfumed with herbs. Sitting on the table was not allowed. During a thunderstorm, all windows had to be closed. When someone died in the family, mirrors would be covered, clocks would be stopped, and the whole house would become enveloped in silence. There were plenty of rules and regulations that governed the space, and they were best obeyed for peace of mind. To describe these rituals, Franczak uses elegant forms and abstract, balanced language, as if she were following a handbook on good manners. Her work abounds in a variety of gestures, which refer to securing, renewing, patching and marking things. As well as patience and accuracy, these activities require muscle work and sweat. Not all of the depicted instructions and rules can be easily deciphered. The luxury of domestication requires great effort.
Curator: Marta Lisok