Adopted Shapes (in between)

Alicja Bielawska’s works originate from the intense experience of being within the world of material objects. Her artistic search must be located in the broader current of the turn towards materiality, which is evident in Polish humanist scholarship and social sciences since the 1990s, and in the group of artistic proposals the authors of which all, albeit in various ways, observe objects. Analyses of the biographies of objects conducted within the area of visual arts reveal the meanings ascribed to them and various aspects of their functioning, including those linked with those objects’ participation in social transactions.

Bielawska decides to tell a personal story about objects, which does not mean she uses objects associated with her private life. This personal element has an universal dimension and must be understood as a way of experiencing objects that is common to a broader group of recipients: the acts of noticing, naming and interacting with objects. Bielawska’s works refer directly to objects of everyday use, although in themselves they have nothing to do with the principle of utilitas. In creating them, she uses truly commonplace materials, such as linoleum, artificial veneer or metal bars, while each of the applied substances is new, that is bears no traces of life, the stratum of meanings or marks of history (private or collective), which are ordinary left on objects by their functioning in the universe of human beings. With objects constructed by Bielawska, it is the recipient that projects the senses generated from the archive of his/her memories onto them. Personal involvement with her works is facilitated by their proportions, which are based on the Golden Measure, and by their size, referring to the artist’s own height, which was adopted by her as standard for an average viewer.

The universalism of Bielawska’s works lies in the fact that they may be perceived as the sign of that intangibility which, although it usually hovers between the familiar concepts, structures or motifs, eludes clear definitions. Imagination dictates various forms that may be its designates, but such constructs are almost always considered incomplete and “unclosed”, and are defined by absence. Yet nevertheless Adopted Shapes seem to convey the essence of things, as if they were a materialization of something that we would be tempted to call the objects’ core, their inalienable component. Bielawska follows the traces left in one’s memory by once-seen shapes, collects scattered images of things, attempts to capture their prototypic form, for which she finds a simple shape that is intuitively perceived as familiar and dear.

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translated from Polish by Klaudyna Michałowicz