The Riverview Arts Festival, Warsztaty Kultury, Lublin, 2024
Phot. Marcin Butryn

“At this Time of the Day Even Shadows Have Colours (Pavilion)” is an art installation referring to the architecture of garden pavilions. It is set in a meadow next to the Bystrzyca River in Lublin. Light, semi-transparent fabrics suspended on a metal structure, move in the wind, the sun shines through them, mixing their colors. You can sit or lie down on the grass and watch them move. It is a work that draws attention to a given moment, to a moment that lasts. Observing, looking at reality requires stopping, slowing down the rhythm. This pavilion of colorful shadows attracts attention, from this place we can look at the surroundings in a different way. You can see how the sun is reflected in the water, how the duck’s feathers sparkle, how the dragonfly sways on the grass.

Foksal Gallery, Warsaw, 2024
Curator Maria Rubersz
Phot. Tytus Szabelski-Różniak

The body uses the senses to delve into the spaces and phenomena that surround it. It has its memory, allowing it to operate independent of the mind and discourse. It reacts to its surroundings, e.g. to a wall drawing, which holds performative potential. A drawing can take the hand’s kinesis and pass it on. The sight that looks without being set and focused on any one object, sight looking through silk, at semi-transparent fabrics with colors derived from natural dyes, sees differently. In his essay “The Eyes of the Skin,” whose title Alicja Bielawska has borrowed for her Foksal Gallery exhibition, Juhani Pallasmaa wrote: “Focused vision confronts us with the world, whereas peripheral vision envelops us in ‘the flesh of the world’.”*

Bringing her works into the space of the gallery, the artist alters the perfect white cube, known from thousands of photographs documenting hundreds of exhibitions since 1966 at Foksal Gallery, to encourage pleasure and comfort in the body. The central object of the exhibition is a soft, household seat, upholstered with jacquard fabric stitched according the artist’s design. The seat is the furthest thing from the minimalist, angular stools associated with Foksal Gallery, which once served as pedestals for displaying archival materials, still serving in the gallery as guardians of the past.

Working with the space, Alicja Bielawska also works with memory. The first thirty years of the gallery’s operations were decidedly androcentric. It was almost exclusively men who exhibited here, and most of the few women artists who appeared were tied to men who were important to the Foksal Gallery scene. An anecdote confirmed in the archive says that Annette Messager only exhibited at Foksal Gallery in 1978 because her partner, Christian Boltanski, made the presentation of his partner’s work a condition for his exhibition. Though few women have exhibited at Foksal Gallery, they have played a fundamental role. It suffices to look at the photographs of the openings or the gallery’s everyday workings. Although women worked with the artists organizing the exhibitions, their names do not appear in the archive, nor in traces or anecdotes. Women’s work for the gallery might be called a “labour of love,” as Wiktoria Szczupacka analyzes in her essay, “Foksal Gallery, Women and Labour of Love in the 1960s and 1970s.”**

Alicja Bielawska’s view of history is a peripheral view. The artist saw people, motifs, stories, traces, and invisible work, without which the gallery could not have operated. Artists, curators, and viewers, male and female, have spent time here, talked, created, forged and maintained contacts, experienced and created places. The focused gaze does not perceive this, for the focused gaze it is merely a vague and uninteresting backdrop. Warping the sharp edges and blurring the white cube, the artist has created a place to be together, to feel pleasure and safety.

Maria Rubersz

* Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2024), 6.
** Wiktoria Szczupacka, “Foksal Gallery, Women and Labour of Love in the 1960s and 1970s” in Revisiting Heritage, ed. Marika Kuźmicz (Warsaw: Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, 2019), 92–99 https://issuu.com/…/arton_book_revisiting_heritage_-_pd

Galeria Sztuki im. Jana Tarasina, Kalisz, 2024
Curator Paulina Olszewska
Phot. Bartosz Górka

In motion and in stillness

In spring, the Narew floodplains sparkle in the sun. The river, visible from the windows of Teresa Starzec and Alicja Bielawska’s house in Podlasie, seems to expand to the horizon. The vast landscape is not static even for a moment: its light changes with the time of day, and its shapes and colors change with the seasons.
Joint exhibition of women artists at Jan Tarasin Art Gallery in Kalisz transfers the dynamics of the Narew landscape to the exhibition space. Already in the vestibule of the exhibition we will come across golden, metallic ribbons – a fragment of Alicja Bielawska’s installation, which introduces almost dance-like movement into the gallery. The objects – screens – placed by the artist in the main hall co-create the choreography of the exhibition – their semicircular structures create circles in space. Fabrics flowing freely over them react to subtle air movements caused by the movement of viewers. The light entering through the windows is filtered by translucent, layered materials, which means that the perception of the installation changes during the day.
Teresa Starzec’s drawings and paintings are also full of movement. Their vibrant, energetic colors flow into each other, creating colorful bridges between compositions. The forms of the paintings arise from drawings in sketchbooks. The artist makes them not from nature, but, as she says, from memory. She draws them in the studio, sweepingly, using the energy of her whole body and pressing the accumulated emotions and impressions from observing selected motifs into the paper. She creates drawings in series, in one or several days, until they fill the entire sketchbook and become almost abstract – the final ones, the least representative, seem to touch the essence of reality. Some of them later become the seeds of paintings whose composition grows organically – in those presented in Kalisz, the flower petals smoothly turned into a landscape, and the color spots gained a cosmic element.
In the exhibition space filled with movement, the artists encourage us to stop and practice attentiveness. Seats designed by Alicja Bielawska allow viewers to change their body positions. Upholstered in soft jacquard fabrics, the patterns of which were also inspired by the Narew floodplains, they allow one to immerse oneself in the moment and actively, carefully observe one’s surroundings. They make it easier to focus and notice details. To identify differences in the intensity of colors and light in Teresa Starzec’s paintings, which result from observing the same motifs in the changing light of the day and seasons. To appreciate the colors of fabrics hand-dyed by Alicja Bielawska using madder, onion peels, and spruce cones, which introduce color directly distilled from nature into the gallery space. A slower observation will also allow one to notice the light scattered in the gallery. This, penetrating through the abstract holes of Cutouts by Bielawska – a screen inspired by the paper works of her grandmother, Halina Bielawska – at certain times of the day creates a mosaic of sunbeams in the gallery space, similar to the sparkling glints from the Narew pools.
Attentiveness is studying, discovering, experiencing the world in a multi-sensory manner, collecting and cultivating impressions, and memory work. It is easy to forget about it in the everyday rush. By introducing dynamics into the gallery space inspired by the experience of the natural landscape, the artists encourage us to immerse ourselves in the variability of nature and show that both in motion and in stillness we can be its active, conscious observers.

Aleksandra Kędziorek