A concrete Mother and Father’s multifunctional objects

Kobas Laksa’s series of photographic portraits of objects resulted from his return to his family home. Important to our understanding of this work is the author’s own commentary recorded in the framework of a cycle of films concerning artworks in Collection II of the Arsenal Gallery in Białystok*. The photographer invites his spectators to a flat in a Białystok housing estate, where his mother (and at the same time his son’s grandmother, “Granny Mira”) lives. The flat turns out to be a veritable universe of things; apart from books, pictures showing religious themes and bric-a-brac to make the rooms more cosy, the space is filled with electrical appliances: there are radios, a sewing machine, a TV set and a videocassette recorder, and various lamps. The weirdest item is a little altar with the Virgin Mary, lit from the inside, proudly displayed just by the TV set; certainly the most precious of the household’s devotional articles. From the depths of her wardrobe, the artist’s mother pulls out a box with a face massager which is already “o-oh, thirty years old” and which she has never used once. There are many more utensils of this kind in that wardrobe.

Then, for a brief moment, Laksa descends to the cellar, which used to be his late father’s domain. It was he, too, that purchased most of the household items; they are now interesting as relics of the former system and the era of the political transformation, triumphantly bought at bazaars and in border zones or illicitly procured from under the counter. They are worn out, held together with duct tape, with noticeable rust stains and irremovable grime. It is hard to resist the feeling that the cellar is a depository for junk, a small “sentimental midden” in the catacombs of a residential block, and that this bizarre collection is governed by the rules of compulsive hoarding.
Laksa’s private perspective which he reveals to the spectator changes the perception gained from a superficial glance at his family home. Without it, we would be ready to regard the portraits of objects photographed against a neutral background in the context of the debate, now current in the humanities, concerning a turn towards things. Yet amidst this constellation of objects, the central figures are the artist’s mother and father. His mother cherishes things. To her, as to Laksa himself, they are a repository of the remembrance of their husband and father, his sui generis emanation. Those items evoke memories, bring back the past, prevent their former owner’s final departure. An insight into the artist’s perception makes it possible to delineate a unique biography of objects he had photographed; an exceptional biography, because it is inseparably connected with a concrete person, the artist’s father, and his vision of the world.

* Cf. Posłuchaj kolekcji: Kobas Laksa o pracy „Matka konkretna i wielofunkcyjne obiekty Ojca” (2018), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnSsncTW-lM.