I used to go to the zoo to watch panthers…
…But I am not sure if I would want to have any physical contact with them…*
The double title of Ewa Ciepielewska’s exhibition illustrates both being here and looking from a distance – a search for individual position and private opposition is at its essence. The exhibition, composed of pieces from the 1980s and 1990s – a time of political and social transition, a moment similarly twofold and undefined – is a story constructed from Ciepielewska’s figurative works. The multilayered narrative, where the political is interwoven with the sexual, and rave with new age, appears to be as relevant to the period of their production as to the present. Therefore, it exists in varied time lines and with timelessness, where the desire for rebellion and artistic resistance is invariably relevant. Only its source changes: from the crassitude of the Polish People’s Republic, via the absurdities of early Polish capitalism, to today’s capitalism of the precariat and the conservative revolution.
Ewa Ciepielewska tends to simply observe from a distance her own place in the system. She is, in fact, against the system. In as much as a bottle, for instance, can be used both to make a Molotov cocktail or as a vase. The vase’s ability to sprout fresh robust vegetables and exotic fruit.
* is a mystery, enabling it to burst the system from the inside and potentially build a new one.
curators: Kamil Kuitkowski, Kola Śliwińska
