Alicja Karska & Aleksandra Went
Fields

Alicja Karska and Aleksandra Went

Fields

Opening: Friday, 04.03.2022, 7 pm–9 pm

05.03.22–09.04.2022

Tuesday–Saturday, 12 noon–7 pm

In Alicja Karska’s and Aleksandra Went’s works, things whose time, it would seem, has already passed, take on meaning. What goes unnoticed by an unconscious glance, turns out to be a discovery that attracts vision only in the frozen frame of a photograph. Often not explicitly stated, the artists’ works have a refined beauty of images, a charm of the bygone, an aura that hides the memory of an unobvious past. In many projects, they address the problem of memory and the recovery for culture of what has been overlooked and forgotten. They show disappearing areas of contemporary visuality, cultural phenomena from the fringes of urban spaces and peripheries of contemporary imagination. Their dialogue with the past is built in a way that deviates from the dominant narratives; in their works, they often refer to latent and neglected memory.

The large, dark photographic composition is made up of cropped fragments of shots of the site of a fire that the artists accidentally stumbled upon in Krems, Austria. Photos of the remains of burnt books and documents show charred remains. The layout of the combined frames captivates with the visual appeal of the images of the partially incinerated ruin. For years, the artists have been engaged in a kind of cultural recycling, in which the past, the withdrawn from circulation or the simply discarded is updated and acquires new meanings. They construct their own archive of waste and unnecessary leftovers. In a series of over a dozen photographs, they documented the glass remnants left behind by the Ząbkowice Glassworks in Dąbrowa Górnicza. In a landfill of multicoloured shards, they found fragments of vessels that were the work of the prominent glass designers Eryka Trzewik-Drost and Jan Sylwester Drost. The artists titled their work after the Drosts’ projects, turning a dump of glass refuse into a graveyard of recent achievements of Polish design. In the heaps of waste and remnant recorded in the photographs, what we no longer want to see demands our attention, the previously abandoned begins to play a prominent role.

The authors of the photographic series entitled Fields do not allow even the smallest things to be overlooked. In the photographs from the cemetery meadow, they depict what they found “under their feet”. Taken from above, the shots bring out fragments of discarded artificial flowers from the thicket of grass and dry leaves. Details that are usually overlooked, insignificant – one would like to say imperceptible to the “naked eye” – scraps, gain a visually and symbolically significant presence.