{"id":1659,"date":"2022-09-05T10:25:42","date_gmt":"2022-09-05T02:25:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/?p=1659"},"modified":"2022-09-05T10:25:42","modified_gmt":"2022-09-05T02:25:42","slug":"a-bracing-survey-of-polish-feminist-art-in-brooklyn-makes-a-call-for-womens-rights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.atelierauction.com\/globalupdates\/artist\/a-bracing-survey-of-polish-feminist-art-in-brooklyn-makes-a-call-for-womens-rights\/","title":{"rendered":"A Bracing Survey of Polish Feminist Art in Brooklyn Makes a Call for Women\u2019s Rights"},"content":{"rendered":"

Among the many works of Polish feminist art on view at Brooklyn\u2019s\u00a0A.I.R. Gallery<\/a>\u00a0right now are two by artist and trained pianist Monika Weiss: the graphite drawing\u00a0Nirbhaya II<\/em>, from 2020, and the sound installation\u00a0METAMORPHOSIS\/DAFNE (NIRBHAYA),<\/em>\u00a0created last year. For the latter, you sit on a piano bench facing a blank wall as a sound composition in five movements emanates through noise-canceling headphones.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a disquieting experience. The composition is dedicated to victims of gendered violence and inspired by the Greek myth of Daphne, a nymph who escaped Apollo\u2019s advances by transforming into a laurel tree. For one movement, eight vocalists were recorded individually. Their audio was then layered to evoke a chorus of ghosts whose voices rise and fall in lamentation.<\/p>\n

METAMORPHOSIS\/DAFNE (NIRBHAYA)\u00a0<\/em>is Weiss\u2019s ode to Daphne, whose tragedy was twisted somewhere into a love story, and Nirbhaya, the name was given to the 23-year-old woman who was\u00a0raped and killed in New Delhi, India, in 2012<\/a>. In Hindi, Nirbhaya means \u201cfearless.\u201d It would be nice if our world were like Daphne\u2019s, where the soul isn\u2019t a hostage to the body.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe transformation is horrific, but also liberating,\u201d Weiss said in an interview. \u201cThe moment is full of wrath: Try and catch me? I\u2019ll become a tree, fuck you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Weiss\u2019s piece is one among many in \u201cSleepless in Warsaw,\u201d a survey of fifty years of feminist art in\u00a0Poland. The mood across the works on view swings from defiant to sorrowful. There\u2019s also room for joy and mischief.<\/p>\n

Curated by Agnieszka Rayzacher, the show is the product of a several-year collaboration with the Warsaw-based gallery lokal_30, which currently has on view\u00a0an exhibition of A.I.R. artists<\/a>. \u201cSleepless in Warsaw\u201d assembles paintings, videos, sound installations, photography, and wall-mounted sculptures by nearly two dozen Polish artists, almost all of whom are women. There is also one Ukrainian female artist, Oksana Briukhovetska, whose tapestry is displayed in the gallery\u2019s window in a signal of solidarity. Pioneers of Polish feminist art are represented, including Jolanta Marcolla and Natalia LL, who\u00a0died shortly after the exhibition opened,<\/a>\u00a0and Zbigniew Libera, a video and installation artist, and one of the few men included.<\/p>\n

The show is divided into three sections: first, works created in the last dozen years; then, ones from Poland\u2019s democracy and capitalist transition between 1981\u201391; and lastly, the lodestone works from the 1970s and early 1980s. The reverse chronological approach helps show how the movement has expanded.<\/p>\n

According to Rayzacher\u2019s statement, \u201csleeplessness can also be seen as a state of hypersensitivity, an inability to come to terms with the existing order, or rather disorder, of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

The sensibility is apparent in a large oil painting made by Anna Orbaczewska this year,\u00a0Piet\u00e0<\/em>, which dominates one wall. Orbaczewska often paints ambiguous interpersonal dramas on canvas, paper, and ceramic, where narrative cedes to vibe, but this one is decisively about escaping a toxic relationship. A blue woman struggles against, or collapses into, the embrace of another against a blood-red bleeding background.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnna defends herself as much as she can: she refuses to bury her feelings,\u201d Rayzacher wrote in the catalogue from Orbaczewska\u2019s 2020 show \u201cI do not know how I should tell that\u201d at\u00a0Galeria BWA in Zielona G\u00f3ra.\u00a0\u201cWhen this tranquil person touches a paper with a paintbrush, she begins to yell, scream and howl. She is no longer a woman, but a witch.\u201d There\u2019s an occult edge to\u00a0Piet\u00e0<\/em>\u2014the hood, the ritual underway on the blue woman\u2014but Rayzacher\u2019s commentary touches on a theme running throughout the show: the aesthetic and practical value of the female body.<\/p>\n

Orbaczewska\u2019s painting shares a wall with a banner-like photograph by Iwona Demko from 2017. It\u2019s titled\u00a0Skirt Lifting or My Dream about the Black Protest<\/em>, and it depicts the artist raising her skirt to expose her genitals, a gesture of protest known as\u00a0anasyrma<\/em>. \u201cIn many cultures, it served to humiliate those who committed violence or disgraceful and offensive acts,\u201d the wall text explains. The photograph is meant to include 408,223 images of Demko, one for each woman living in Krakow in 2016, and aims her ire at Poland\u2019s abortion restrictions.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Another witchy woman comes courtesy of Natalia LL, whose iconic series\u00a0Consumer Art<\/em>\u00a0(1972\u201375) features a 16-minute video and close-up photographs depicting young women suggestively consuming bananas, among other foods. Natalia LL\u2019s brash critiques of conservatism and consumerism in Communist Poland profoundly changed the perception of women artists, even though the artist herself later made attempts to distance her work from the feminist movement. Ewa Partum, a contemporary of Natalia LL, once said she would perform naked out in public until women in the art world obtained equity. In\u00a0Self-identification<\/em>\u00a0(1980), the nude Partum meets a bride in front of the Warsaw Civil Registry Office. The latter\u2019s marriage suit seems stifling in comparison.<\/p>\n

Natalia LL\u2019s work, meanwhile, is still causing a stir: in 2019, the director of the National Museum in Warsaw, Jerzy Mizio\u0142ek, pulled\u00a0Consumer Art,\u00a0<\/em>along with works by Katarzyna Kozyra and the artist duo Karolina Wiktor and Aleksandra Kubiak, from view, claiming that they \u201chave a distracting influence on young people.\u201d It was treated as an act of censorship stemming from the Polish government\u2019s slide into right-wing extremism.<\/p>\n

The political shift has resulted in an ideological takeover of state-run museums and a threat to any groups who don\u2019t conform to strict Catholic values. Last year,\u00a0Human Rights Watch<\/a>\u00a0warned of an \u201cincreasingly hostile and even violent environment for women\u2019s rights and their defenders in Poland.\u201d On March 8, International Women\u2019s Day, at least six human rights organizations in Warsaw\u2014including the Women\u2019s Rights Center, which hosts a domestic violence survivors group founded by one of the exhibition\u2019s artists, Zuzanna Janin\u2014received bomb and death threats.<\/p>\n

Janin\u2019s floor-to-ceiling series of drawings and collages\u00a0TAKOTSUBO (Recovering from the Broken Heart Disease),\u00a0<\/em>from 2020, is installed at the gallery\u2019s entrance, so it\u2019s the first and last artwork seen. Takotsubo is commonly known as broken heart syndrome, in which distress weakens the heart\u2019s main pumping chamber. The stress here is the bitter dissolution of Janin\u2019s marriage.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe point of the artist is to show what\u2019s inside us,\u201d Janin said. \u201cBut in art, the woman is almost always drawn from the outside by others. That\u2019s not what\u2019s happening here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most pieces in the series were drawn on envelopes and letters addressed to her and her ex-husband during lockdown. They feature beating hearts and anguished faces. A neon sign spelling out \u201cNobody is Going to Believe You\u201d runs across the collage.<\/p>\n

A survey like this inevitably illustrates the cyclical nature of social progress. But it doesn\u2019t settle in cynicism: a banner by\u00a0Pawe\u0142 \u017bukowski\u00a0unfurls across the gallery ceiling. It reads, \u201cI believe you, Zuzanna.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Source: https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Among the many works of Polish feminist art on view at Brooklyn\u2019s\u00a0A.I.R. Gallery\u00a0right now are two by artist and trained pianist Monika Weiss: the graphite drawing\u00a0Nirbhaya II, from 2020, and the sound installation\u00a0METAMORPHOSIS\/DAFNE (NIRBHAYA),\u00a0created last year. For the latter, you sit on a piano bench facing a blank wall as a sound composition in five […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1660,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5,13,7,4,3],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1659","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artist","8":"category-auction","9":"category-events","10":"category-gallery","11":"category-latest-news"},"yoast_head":"\nA Bracing Survey of Polish Feminist Art in Brooklyn Makes a Call for Women\u2019s Rights - Investable Art Auctioneer<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Among the many works of Polish feminist art on view at Brooklyn\u2019s\u00a0A.I.R. 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