texts
Wege zur Behandlung von Schmerzen by Mirosław Bałka
The roar of the water evokes a feeling of unease, reminding you of your childhood and your fears of stormy, muddy water, or of falling into a well and drowning. The ominous roar of rushing water greets you at the doors of the western wing of the Four Domes Pavilion. The liquid pours into a metal reservoir that occupies much of the space inside. The thick, polluted water is circulated through a closed loop, pumping out of the reservoir only to pour back in a moment later. The installation Wege zur Behandlung von Schmerzen by Mirosław Bałka was one of the projects presented as a part of the Trickster 2011 series at the European Culture Congress in Wrocław.
Angelika Markul’s GLOSSARY
Angelika Markul, New Moon, CoCA in Torun, photo by Wojciech Olech
Eerie silence reigns in Angelika Markul’s world. Hers is a post-traumatic world in mourning, haunted by frosty puffs of wind, immersed in a melancholic absence of daylight, where only petty cruelties happen. Everything follows quasi-biological cycles of growth, respiration, consumption or excretion… This glossary, accompanying the exhibition New Moon, is an attempt to provide important clues for the interpretation of Angelika Markul’s work.
black plastic film
Used in gardening for packing soil, but also for covering dead bodies after a crash. In Angelika Markul’s work black film is sculptural material. Although ordinary, it shines like a piece of precious material. Although thin as human skin, it is heavy and takes up space. Part body and part secretion, it is an organically structured monster crawling out of sarcophaguses made of glass and wood. Occasionally, it spreads over the floor like lava. The strange stickiness of the sculptures is repulsive but also mysteriously attractive. One would like to look inside, cut the drapery open. It is also similar to the lamella described by Lacan as an organ similar to amoeba: immortal, imperishable, simple, in constant motion, libidal … ‘But suppose it comes and envelopes your face while you are quietly asleep …’1 Angelika Markul remembers the story of a black death figure that her grandma told her. The features of the material change when the film is pressed with glass: it is a ‘parody’ of tombstone marble or a lump of coal. Georges Bataille writes: ‘each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form … Thus lead is the parody of gold. Air is the parody of water. The brain is the parody of the equator. Coitus is the parody of crime.’2
New Moon (2009), Entre-deux (2009), Porte du Néant (2007), Untitled (2008), Breath (2008)
carnivorous plant
The artist says: ‘I sometimes think of myself as a sundew, the “horrible flower” which is the “protagonist” in my film.3’ The plant in question defies classification. It germinates comparatively quickly in wet tropical places, soon to disappear into the soil again. It provokes detestation. Part animal and part plant. Its stalk is covered with shiny blobs of dark mucilage and its form implies a thirst for blood. It bears close similarity to the cutthroat plant in Roger Corman’s The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), which spoilt the quiet life of a florist. Yet its shape is ‘human’ enough (the artist’s hand arranged to resemble the carnivorous plant) to also evoke an association with the mandrake, a plant used by sorcerers. The mandrake was believed to grow where the semen of a hanged man fell down to the earth resulting in a ‘cursed’ conception. The scream of a mandrake pulled out of soil caused madness.
My Nature (2005)
cruelty
Cruelty may be great or petty, like, for instance, holding a fly by its wing.
Seen (2005), Casela (2006)
gate
Light, transparent, ajar, bathed in the greenish glow of fluorescent lamps — an invitation to come in. Angelika Markul divides the space with gatesimages, mapping out new stages of the journey, playing with transparencies. She claims that they make the world look like the bottom of the ocean.
Untitled (2009)
insects
Although insects are an inseparable part of the world we live in, they frequently trigger fears and phobias. Their agility, their ephemeral nature, their love of deserted places and their voracity, particularly in the terminal sense, are found terrifying. Markul recalls: ‘Rooms for a month are rented by immigrants … In Paris such “hotels” are very unpleasant, and I used to live in one for a long time — three or four years. I had to sleep with the light on as great cockroaches materialized in my bed at night, like well-fed swine, and walked all around me…’4
Seen (2005), p. 17, The Language of Insects, (2006)
light
Light with varied colour temperatures is one of the major features in Markul’s work. Light that irritates, pulsates, gives colour and form to space, creates an aura of unreality, and, last but not least — is a parody of moonlight. It usually comes from industrial fluorescent lamps which tend to make the eyes water if one stares at them.
New Moon (2009)
melancholy
Julia Kristeva’s book on melancholy begins like this: ‘For those who are racked by melancholia, writing about it would have meaning only if it sprang out of that very melancholia. I am trying to address an abyss of sorrow, an incommunicable grief that at times, and often on a long-term basis, lays claim upon us to the extent of having us lose all interest in words…, actions, and even life itself. Such despair is not a revulsion that would imply my being capable of desire and creativity, negative indeed but present. Within depression, if my existence is on the verge of collapsing, its lack of meaning is not tragic — it appears obvious to me, glaring and inescapable. Where does this black sun come from? Out of what eerie galaxy do its invisible, lethargic rays reach me, pinning me down and to the ground, to my bed, compelling me to silence?’5
New Moon (2009)
new moon
New moon is one of the lunar phases when the unlit side of the Moon faces the Earth. The title of the exhibition New Moon is a direct reference to this phase. From an astrological point of view, a new moon marks the beginning of a monthly cycle culminating in a full moon, its turning points being the first and the third quarter. The moonless night is regarded especially fortunate in all cultures as the time of purification, balance, transformation and the ‘sowing of seeds’. The night of a new moon is dark. The phenomenon of a new moon is the leitmotif of Angelika Markul’s exhibition at CoCA Toruń. ‘Markul’s black mythology revolves around that gulf in which images originate. Images that give us something extraordinary: the experience of something less and less tangible in culture. The horror of the night has to be put out with artificial light. We live in a culture that has deprived us of contact with the phenomenon of the night. As a matter of fact, we do not know the black night of the new moon or even the silvery night of a full moon. Electric light has made it possible for us to have a nightlife instead of treating the night like a gulf in which (human) life is suspended. Angelika Markul restores the experience of the new moon to us, the sensual experience of the dark night, the power of renewal’.6
New Moon (2009)
orifice
It implies mystery and danger. Mary Douglas claimed that bodily orifices symbolize especially vulnerable points of the body that may let in what is not welcome.7 In Markul’s films, the orifice hints that there exist mysterious passages inaccessible to us. These symbolic passages are often occupied by insects. In the installation Breath, a portentous-looking cavern is lined with black plastic film and cyclically filled with suffocating smoke.
The Language of Insects (2006), Tenant (2004), Seen (2005), Breath (2008)
revulsion
Or abjection — a term introduced by Julia Kristeva in her book Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection in 1980. The abject is comprised of what is beyond our understanding of purity and decency. It describes whatever is rejected, undetermined, unclear, viscous and unordered, placed outside of public discourse. Kristeva writes: ‘Loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste, or dung. The spasms or vomiting that protect me. The repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage, and muck. The shame of compromise, of being in the middle of treachery. The fascinated start that leads me toward and separates me from them.’8
My Nature (2005), Red Room (2003), Megalith (2000), Ether (2000), Les toc auxlegumes (2004), Female Tortoise (2005), Hudson (2005)
snow
It is believed that no two snowflakes are identical. Indeed, this is hardly probable. The Earth covered with snow seems asleep and inaccessible. What is the sound of snow under the feet? What is the sound of a glacier cracking up? All these reflections can be found in Markul’s works — in the rattling of the wind, in the cold light of fluorescent lamps, in the hiss of ventilators. Winter hides even in a small hole in the wall. This is possibly where the entrance to the ‘other side of the looking-glass’ is…
The Language of Insects (2006), Tenant (2004)
trap
Sometimes the form is in contradiction to the function. With their irritating light that might draw insects, some of the predatory objects constructed by the artist are merely suggestive of traps. We observe insects caught in traps laid by nature itself, in places they carelessly penetrate, from which we tend to avert our eyes or choose to live in the hostile human environment. There are, however, several images testifying to the fact that the artist set some real traps — we see a carnivorous plant, a rodent trapped in a snowy burrow and moths attracted by the light of a lamp.
The Language of Insects (2006), Tenant (2004), Untitled (2007)
white noise
A type of acoustic signal (in general: any type of signal) with a flat power spectral density. The term is derived from white light in which the power spectral density of the light is distributed over the visible band in such a way that the eye’s three color receptors are approximately equally stimulated.9 In everyday life, white noise describes the annoying sound and lack of vision when the TV broadcast is over. It can be ominous, as it is in Michael Haneke’s film The Seventh Continent (1989). White noise on a TV screen was the last thing Georg S. heard before his tragic death. At Angelika Markul’s exhibition, the same TV noise silently flickers on aluminium panels deformed by hands. Is this the ‘ultimate’ form of light or the end of a sinister journey?
New Moon (2009)
1 Jacques Lacan, quoted by Slavoj Žižek, How to Read Lacan, http://www.lacan.com/zizalien.htm, 18.08.2009.
2 Georges Bataille, The Solar Anus, http://www.greylodge.org/occultreview/glor_010/solar.htm, 18.08.2009.
3 I Am Keen On Ugly Things . . ., p. 32.
4 I Am Keen On Ugly Things. Angelika Markul talks to Agnieszka Pindera, transl. by M. Ujma, in: Nów / New Moon (2009), exh. cat., Toruń; CSW Znaki Czasu, p. 33.
5 Julia Kristeva, quoted by Alice W. Flaherty (2004) The Midnight Disease. The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, p. 119.
6 Jarosław Lubiak, When the Night Reveals Itself, transl. by M. Ujma, in: Nów / New Moon, p. 11.
7 Anna Wieczorkiewicz (2000), Muzeum ludzkich ciał. Anatomia spojrzenia, Gdańsk: słowo/obraz terytoria, p. 71.
8 Julia Kristeva (1982), Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection, transl. by L.S. Roudiez, New York:Columbia University Press, p. 11.
9 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_noise.
A Photograph is Never Just a Print
(about Krzysztof Zieliński’s photographic series)
Photography theoreticians regard photography as a new type of “hallucination”— real only at the level of time. A photograph is never an ordinary print, it transcends the photographed object. A photograph is where the past and the present meet. Krzysztof Zieliński’s photographic series took shape in the artist’s hometown Wąbrzeźno, to which he returns again and again from places where he once chose to study (Prague) or live (Berlin). His work gives him an opportunity to revisit a familiar locality, as well as to find himself once more “on the margin”. The artist rediscovers an ordinary and well-known world which has largely been excluded from the realm of art.
Zieliński has been taking pictures of the provincial town for several years. All the “non-places” where he photographs testify to his intimate history. Through them the artist can reach for his identity and experience the feeling of emptiness inherent in any return. In his book La photographie: Entre document et Art contemporain, André Rouille uses the term micro-resistance to refer to the rediscovery of local phenomena, a search of one’s own territory in a world where the media do their best to lure us with the farthest unknown places. As the artist claims, coming home was a form of rebellion.
He saw the making of the Hometown cycle as a form of therapy as well as a painful and almost depressive experience of a familiar place which has grown strange. In the Millennium School pictures we see the artist’s old school in Wąbrzeźno. It was not Zieliński’s intention to stop off at the school, but once he finds himself there he picks up his camera, enchanted by its magical aura. It is the summer season, the school is empty, memories come flooding back, some objects seem familiar, but furniture and walls have been repainted in a most bizarre fashion. The artist wanders around deserted halls and classrooms. The school is a riot of colors, but the many layers of oil paint hide the past and nostalgia. Millennium School is neither a detailed map of the place nor a documentary piece, it is a fairytale land of memories, an attempt at a “search for lost time”. These photographs make us “remember”, they are “signs” of what has passed; they take us to the realm of delight and let us in on the mysteries of memory. Proust repeatedly discusses the obligation he feels — to follow the trail of memories where one sensation reminds him of another, over and over again, triggered by the taste of petite madeleine which reminds him of the madeleine that he had at Combray. Zieliński’s photographs are Proust’s “resurrections of memory”, through them we can relive our childhood and school days, holidays in the countryside, first loves …
In the photographs we recognize things which we will never know. Suddenly, we are the little girl featured in the first photograph in the series. She is looking straight into the lens but the picture seems less real than the rest of the cycle. She is like Alice in Wonderland and she takes the viewers to the other side of the looking-glass, to the land of sweet memories. After his mother’s death, Roland Barthes persistently searched through family photographs for her image. He eventually recognized her in the one of photographs, taken when she was only five years old. He discovered her by moving back in time, even though he could not have remembered her that young. As he writes in Camera Lucida, the photograph gave him a sensation like the one Proust felt when he bent down one day to take off his shoes and instantly saw in his memory the real face of his grandmother.
