12.03-24.04.2010
Trickster is a kind of a con man, pretender and hoaxer, challenging authority. Acting against the acknowledged norms and standards, he breaks all the rules, causing chaos. It is in this archetypal meaning, in which Aleksandra Polisiewicz calls up the trickster in her tug-of-war with the founding myth of Europe.
Her photographs, even if they allude to the myth of the rape of Europa, depart from the iconography inspired by Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”. The artist reverses the relations of the mythical story; here, it is not the seduced princess who is the victim but the unsuccessful kidnapper. The head of a dead bull in the scenes featuring the artist herself is the up-dated phantasm, referring to mythological and Biblical heroines who render the saying “bite one’s head off” bitingly literal.
The author of this photographic staging cunningly joins in the centuries-old struggle of symbolical and allegorical images of women. In the parallel presentations of her films, she pulls a plough, writing Herstory, or runs with an electric bulb, wielding it like an Olympic fire in the Promethean gesture borrowed from female allegories.
Her “Trickster” is a kind of political fiction, where there is more at stake than a mere translation of mythological stories into the contemporary language of visual culture. The shattering of the divine plan of the rape of Europa would destroy grand narratives and introduce symbolical confusion, including the currently evoked myth of Europe being discovered.
At the exhibition for the Profile Foundation, the artist also presents her new version of “The Idol of the Vistula River” – a visual parable about the symbolical skirmishes between contemporary images of power.
Curator of the exhibition: Bożena Czubak
March 2010-April 2010
Foundation Profile, Warsaw
Aleksandra Polisiewicz, Trickster, 2010
Aleksandra Polisiewicz, Idol nadwiślański, 2010
