Artist: Aleksandra Młynarczyk-Gemza
Curators: Marta Dymitrowska, Bartłomiej Dobroczyński
Exhibition organized within the framework of Cracow Art Week KRAKERS 2024
Bartłomiej Dobroczyński
The Unbearable Melancholy of Detail, or the Feeling of Not Being at Home
Aleksandra Młynarczyk Gemza in Shefter Gallery
…the feeling that the most commonplace object is magnificently strange…
Austin Osman Spare
Aleksandra Młynarczyk-Gemza’s exhibition was created in the context of sinister events that recently shattered the peace of our stable existence (as we wrongly thought), questioned its immutable certainties, and challenged our sense of safety. It is a sort of philosophical treatise on Home, “written” with moving and still images, sounds, and spatial arrangements. It is devoted to the tension arising from the antagonism between the sense of homeliness and settling down on one side, and foreignness and bizarreness on the other. It is a memorable statement by an artist who deeply experienced and is still experiencing the situation of Russia’s aggression on Ukraine (where her partner is from) as well as the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic, accompanying social isolation, and rapidly increasing ecological and civilizational threats. It is both an affirmation of our everyday normalcy and a moving testimony of fear that we might lose it.
The exhibition consists of three video works (“Witchcraft”, “Domeczek”, and “Achtung”) and, being its main thematic motif, a series of photos that began to be created at the moment of the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. Within it, AMG presents two ordinary-extraordinary apartments – in radically different tonalities and compositional arrangements – and their inhabitants. The people and inanimate “objects”, she has portrayed, remind us of old paintings depicting genre scenes, aristocracy, and the wealthy bourgeoisie captured in the surroundings of objects and interiors attesting to their high social status and material success. However, they are shown in a way that is a blatant denial of the superficially understood splendor or luxury emanating both from the works of recognized masters like Frans Hals or Willem Buytewech, as well as their contemporary incarnations shamelessly idealizing our daily existence on Instagram and Facebook. They rather give the impression of their grotesque, though not unkind, deconstruction.
The role of human figures in AMG’s photos is somewhat secondary and reduced to a minimum. We see them in just a few photographs in careless poses, naked or hidden behind theatrical masks, which almost makes it impossible to determine their status or state of possession. It makes them almost anonymous. What comes to the forefront instead are the interiors and everyday use objects. However, their selection and composition appear as a denial of the thoughtful and elegant harmony known from Flemish or Spanish masters’ still lives and the Photoshopped arrangements of contemporary Insta-stories. The artist wants to show us that now something else counts. Because in the face of increasing threats and uncertainties, those usually underappreciated situations and dimensions of everyday life, which we would not have considered as sufficiently accurate representations of our well-being and success, begin to gain immense value. Certainly, we would not brag about them to our relatives and acquaintances. It turns out that in the perspective of armed conflict, violent death, mutilation, forced migration, slavery, or incurable somatic or mental illness – and some of these threats have recently become surprisingly real, while others have always been such – the most ordinary props of everyday life, such as a scratched table, dirty dishes in the sink, drying laundry, a smeared window pane, or carelessly scattered everyday objects, suddenly undergo a surprising metamorphosis. Although often neglected, worn out, damaged, and even ugly, kitschy, and tasteless, they can miraculously transform into their opposite, thus into something beautiful and coveted, for which we will miss and dream of returning. Similarly, a not very pretty and not very wealthy house filled with junk and unnecessary objects, but also memories of difficult and painful situations that in no way match our dreams and desires, suddenly turns out to be an object of value and desire. And it becomes one only when it clearly comes to us that we can lose it forever. And only then does its surprising and initially not obvious beauty reveal itself, transcending all aesthetic canons and rules of good taste. This understanding is usually accompanied by melancholy, closely related to the one that sometimes envelops memories from times of long-gone childhood. We know perfectly well that such a sense of carefreeness, security, and “immortality” that we had then will never be achieved again.
War with all its necrophilia and destruction, the growing cult of strength and violence, the threatening climate and ecological disaster, the uncontrolled development of information technologies that are the essence of surveillance capitalism (term by Shoshana Zuboff) – all this makes our potential homelessness more and more real. It does not have only a material, literal dimension. Behind it hides perhaps an even more dangerous homelessness – symbolic and spiritual, cultural disinheritance. In the face of the degradation and decomposition of the most important narratives that have cemented people so far, i.e., fundamental religious, political, artistic, and community ideas, we are threatened with a very disturbing status of “prodigal orphans” who have nowhere to return because their spiritual parents have gone into non-existence. Although it may seem that they are still alive and active, it can no longer be hidden the uncomfortable truth: either they died so long ago that we have already forgotten about it, or at best they have the status of zombies – living dead with whom it is impossible to make contact, let alone entrust them with our safety.
In such a defined atmosphere, AMG, with the “cunning naivety” of a sensitive and prematurely intellectually developed child, asks us difficult questions. How is it possible that a table with a bottle of mineral water, glasses, and a handbag is still the same and continues to exist, cold and insensitive to the fact that rockets are falling on houses and killing men, women, children, and animals? How is it that potted plants grow as if completely unaware that the apocalypse is coming, the Amazon rainforests are burning, the great extinction of species is becoming a fact, and entire areas of the earth are turning into deserts? Why does the stream of water from the tap flow onto the dishes in the sink with soulless indifference when, at the same time, women are being raped and men are being tortured? How does it happen that a plush bear sits quietly in an armchair when children are hungry, more and more people vegetate in poverty and uncertainty of tomorrow, and the whole known world is falling apart and there is not a trace of a sense of security left? Finally, she freezes in amazement that the confession “I love you” and the dismissive response to it continue to be pinned to the fridge even though the authors of these words have long been dead. But by asking these painful questions and marveling at the cosmos, she does not give up her mission as an emissary of obscure beauty. For all these peculiar props and scenes captured from everyday life, she preserves on light-sensitive film and immortalizes despite their sometimes-overwhelming ugliness. She transforms with her gaze this unruly “junkyard of reality” to extract hidden beauty and poetry from it with extraordinary skill. Operating skillfully with light and shadow, she gives it a pictorial dimension and character. She also sensitizes us to the fact that – as the Aztec ruler, poet, and thinker Nezahualcoyotl warned several centuries ago – “this land is only lent to us” and we are never really able to settle down on it for good.
In the wonderful novel Time Shelter by Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov, a fascinating though ambivalent vision of human memory is presented, which becomes an individual and collective remedy for the feeling of alienation, spiritual homelessness, uncertainty, and fear of change, but also for neurodegenerative diseases or identity disorders. Memory is there stimulated by an appropriate arrangement of the environment, thanks to which we can reverse amnesia and regain a sense of homeliness and settlement. The presented exhibition is, in a way, a future-oriented, prospective variation on this idea. It is conceived as a kind of “Fate shelter”, a magical spell to deprive the evil Archonts, Ananke, Heimarmene, and all other forces that, as it was believed since the dawn of time, decided our life, often turning it into literal or symbolic homelessness. To achieve this goal, AMG explores, “amplifies,” and juxtaposes with each other non-obvious details, flashes of perception, momentary strikes of reality. She brings to light and immortalizes what was “rejected by the builders”, creating from the collected scraps a cornerstone of extraordinary beauty. Thanks to this, she proves that “there is never beauty without this ugliness which becomes transmuted by its superabundance”. At the same time, she gains a specific added value because, like an experienced witch, she conjures household spirits and arranges between them a “holy conversation” (santa conversazione), although in her photos, mainly objects “commune” with each other, not the Madonna and the saints surrounding her. In this way, she transforms the most ordinary photographs into a kind of “The Storehouses of Memories with an Ever-Open Door”, semi-magical objects hiding our desires and dreams. In the bitter times of cynicism and helplessness in which we live, they become a surprisingly practical therapeutic and even emancipatory tool, which, after all, is any true art. It saves or liberates us, albeit only for a short and defined time, but very effectively, because its beauty, so difficult to conjure up, can at least for a moment snatch the mind tormented by the oppressions of increasingly difficult everyday life from under the dark rule of perfectly settled demons.
