Irena Kalicka
MAKING MOUNTAINS
OUT OF MOLEHILLS

Is believing in tales of fearful horrors lurking in an old mill like making mountains out of molehills? Today, the remnants of old folklore beliefs have become more of a breeding ground for the folklore industry. The images of Baba Yaga, the devil or the Grim Reaper abound in all kinds of not always terrifying characters in mass productions of popular culture. In Irena Kalicka’s works, this folk demonology is approached with tongue in cheek. The glaring raven and the black shadows do not evoke sinister sensations. The devilish attributes can be seen as props from a farmyard of a country house: pitchforks, scythes but also the threshing flail, straw broomstick or wooden ladder.

The artist composes her arrangements from separate photographs, which take the form of undefined characters. Their colourful configurations emanate a sense of humour, with a head in the form of a sandwich, and rubber boots or patent leather shoes on the feet. They hold scythes or pitchforks in their invisible hands. What is in the viscera and the soul is lost behind the drape of the curtain, in the black void behind the fence, in the cabbage leaves or the dark corners of an old mill, where all it takes is a squeak to awaken the dormant demons.

The threat of the Baba Yaga, the devil, bad people or strangers are first methods of disciplining children and then of strengthening the community. Awakening demons is like playing with matches – Kalicka’s compositions, armed with pitchforks, scythes and flails wield the old weapons of the vox populi. It is easier to laugh at the demons of populism than to face their psychosocial roots. The author of the colourful photographic arrangements obviously plays on colloquial associations but also imagination-fuelled phantasms, in which an ordinary molehill easily grows into a foreboding mountain. Already in her earlier series of staged photographs, Kalicka recreated the inclination of contemporary culture to folklore, exoticisation or demonisation in a common sense played out in nationalist narratives.