SCULPTURE. Alicja Karska & Aleksandra Went

In Alicja Karska and Aleksandra Went’s most recent series of works there is not a single sculpture, yet in most of them the artists refer to the modes and ways of thinking about it. They do it in a manner characteristic for their practice which consists in exploring the niche areas of visuality, the peripheries of the contemporary imagination. Earlier, recovering for memory the inferior and forgotten, they used the photo and film cameras to document unfinished buildings, uncompleted projects, crumbling constructions of 20th-century engineering, relics of outdated modernity, anachronistic styles of urban design. In turning towards the bygone and peripheral, Karska and Went don’t try to be nostalgic about what has been irrevocably lost. Rather they engage with phased-out images of disregarded memory. In a project dedicated to Franciszek Duszeńko, they extracted from the late sculptor’s studio never shown before sketches and models for unrealised sculptures. In a book about a Gdańsk library, they presented its interiors with endless rows of shelves and volumes using a pattern woven with 60,000 signatures of books that had never been lent.

In their most recent film, An Archive of Destructs, they enter the basement of the Old Orangery at the Łazienki Królewskie park in Warsaw, recording scenes with a white peacock wandering around the underground spaces among the destructs of 18th- and 19th-century plaster casts of ancient sculptures.

Descending into a cellar located beneath the Royal Sculpture Gallery with its marble statues, the artists show destructs, rejects, highlighting that which deviates from the notion of sculpture as a permanent thing. They show the disintegration of sculpture in a still video frame shot at an old cemetery in Praga, Warsaw. Ivy leaves engraved on a tombstone vanish in the lush vegetation of actual ivy creepers. They transform sculpture’s perceived permanence into imitation, playing on associations with the stony quality of marble in a series of photographs that look like great stone slabs, but are in fact rescaled images of the marble-like patterns of book covers produced using the traditional technique known as ebru. They refer to the art history-entrenched clichés of sculpture’s perception in a short video in which an invisible hand turns the pages of an old sculpture art book. The partial frame shows only fragments of the reproductions and the only hints for reconstructing their actual appearance are provided by the titles, their rhetoric suggesting visual clichés: Standing Figure, Portrait of a Hero, Maternity, First Love, Family, Lovers, Geometric Composition.