Oneiric reality

oryginal tittle: „Oniryczna rzeczywistość”

Emi Art Warsaw, 2024

Curator:

Olga Mzhelskaya

Co-curator, producer:

Michał Jeremi Strzelecki

Photo:

Piotr Szmyt

Egor Piaskovski

Wojtek Ciszkiewicz

Sculpture:

From behind the wall (2016)

Mixed media. Jute bank bags, buttons

35 x 14 x 46 cm

This will be our secret (2020)

Mixed media. Jute bank bags, stole.

97 x 37 x 126 cm

94% (2023)

Wood, steel, synthetic material (prosthesis)

61 x 13 x 15 cm

Can the imperceptible be real?

The exhibition 'Oneiric Reality' takes the viewer into the space of the attic – marginalised, hidden, existing mostly outside the zone of human everyday life. Such a place Carl Jung associated with fears and Gaston Bachelard with memories of loneliness. Even if these spaces no longer exist or are for some reason unattainable, the very fact that they were once inhabited will remain forever. And in such a case, dreams become the meeting point with this shimmering space, which is at once full and empty, existing and absent. Imagination proves to be the last value, turning the lost into a dreamlike home that has lost touch with time.

Rejecting the space itself, the exhibition offers the viewer the opportunity to listen to themselves, to remember their 'lost home', which has dissolved somewhere beyond the boundaries of reality and the past and recreates itself again and again at the junction of imagination and memory, transcending reality and the past.

The exhibition brings together seemingly disparate but ultimately deeply intertwined thoughts, fears, anxieties, joys, desires, pains and discoveries related to one's own body and the presence of the Other. The driving force is the constant search for ways to overcome misunderstanding. It is a search for a place and a time that, in a situation of constant political change, not only offers no support but actually heightens anxiety.

The exhibition is conventionally divided into two thematic areas – 'Shadows of Oppression' and 'Exhibitionism of the Other' – which densely intermingle through symbolism and metaphors. The objects appearing in the exhibition, so often found in attics, embody toxic masculinity, colonialism, and excess that arouse fear and a sense of threat in the unprivileged. Equally, the attic holds secrets – anxieties about the body related to normativity and deviation from the norm.

Human bodies are constantly subjected to disciplinary practices. Categories such as gender, race and sexual expression create narrow and normative definitions and require compliance. It is the pressure to conform bodies that maintains discriminatory systems that lead to objectification, ableism, etc.

The artists in this exhibition critique these societal pressures through the lens of their own experiences and challenge the status quo by creating a liberated expression of physical form.

Here, the loft is a portal, a kaleidoscopic tube in which shards of disparate normativity and fear mingle in a bizarre pattern. And the question arises: which is more realistic: what we see outside, or what hides the attic above our heads, to which we have no keys?

In today's situation of a right-conservative turn, the quest for compromise and normativity create an imaginary average.

Around the figure of the 'average person', all other bodies remain invisible and are thus marginalised. Accepted norms play cruel tricks on everyone because bodies are fragile and subject to constant modification, meaning that any exemplary body can easily fall out of the norm. Essentially, then, the body is many entities at once and is in a state of constant change. Male and female artists represent liberation through hybrid forms, depicting the body in a state of transformation between human, animal and technology. This kind of co-creation gives birth to something new, which can seem monstrous and threatening or something that evokes a smile. We are talking about cyborgs, which, in post-anthropocentric philosophy, are created by social reality while being a product of fiction. According to Dona Haraway, „our time is mythical time, we are all chimeras, invented and fictional hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs”.

Olga Mzhelskaya

Artists: Aleksander Adamov, Bartek Arobal Kociemba, Jan Baszak, Michał Bugalski, Xawery Deskur, Bartłomiej Flis, KANAPLEV+LEIDIK, Ida Karkoszka, Aleksander Kazello, Daniel Kotowski, Magdalena Kròl, Karolina Majewska Freeing, Jan Możdżyński, Magdalena Łapińska-Rozenbaum, Vasilisa Palianina, Natasha Shulte, Liliana Zeic