MAGDALENA CIEMIERKIEWICZ TIME AND LOOP

Opening: 18.11.2022

Open until: 5.01.2023, opening hours: TUE-SAT 12.00-18.00

Time and loop

Many modern events have their beginnings in the periphery, where the past still makes itself felt in various ways. As Dipesh Chakrabarty has stated, the worlds of the past are not completely lost, and the past, present and future form the knots of time that we inhabit. I am inviting the audience to my experience, where growing up in the region of south-eastern Poland, I gradually discovered the worlds of the past that overlap with the present and stories that repeat themselves, circulating along closed trajectories.

On the one hand, my work is closely related to the local, autobiographical context of my origin, and on the other hand, it resonates with the most current events of the present day. Starting from what is close and based on my own experience, I pay attention to global trends that echoes in the local context.

In my works, I perceive the past and the present as orders coexisting within one space and overlapping each other. The specificity of the Polish countryside, which is the main source of my creative references, is connected with repressed history, various forms of spirituality, but also experiences such as living among nameless graves. I touch these problems and try to work through them through art and a creative game with the existing schemes. Following current events such as war, exclusion and the return of fascist tendencies not only in Poland but also globally, I also notice the repetition of history and make attempts to break closed time loops. A future free of destructive patterns is tantamount to the need to escape from the closed curves along which history and spirituality seem to circulate. One of the most important threads in the presented works is a reflection on spirituality rooted in Christianity, which in its rituals and attachment to centuries-old tradition has become detached from real experience and everyday life. Starting from well-known motifs from the history of art and religious symbols, I gradually dismantle the iconographic sacrum. In some of the works presented at the exhibition, the theme of the pieta and its meanings, still present not only in Polish but also in the entire Western tradition, are interrupted and symbolically dismembered. Approaching this motif in a critical way, I see in it the praise of suffering, sacrifice and being locked in a circle of pain. One of the motifs explored at the exhibition is also the ritual and repetition observed in religious traditions, which in my works are embedded in everyday space. In my creative activities, I deconstruct religious patterns, but also create my own vision of spirituality, resulting from artistic expression and everyday existence.

The exhibition sums up the last few years of my activities, in which movement, change and encounter with what is different have become for me a chance to get out of the tightening, repetitive time loop. The shape of the exhibition will consist of media such as collage, artistic fabric, video and painting.

Magdalena Ciemierkiewicz

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Magdalena Ciemierkiewicz, born in 1992 in Rzeszów. In 2016 graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw at the Faculty of Painting. Lives and works in Warsaw.