Arachne

The title of the video by Bogna Burska refers to one of the mythical stories connected with Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, whom Arachne, a talented spinner and embroider, challenged to a duel. As the fabric she had made was just as handsome as the one woven by the daughter of Zeus, the goddess tore it up. The humiliated Arachne tried to commit suicide but Athena did not allow it to happen and changed the mortal creature, who had dared to challenge her, into a spider.

The myth has had many different interpretations. According to the feminist one, Arachne is the archetype of the creator while weaving is the synonym of female production. It is not, however, the most important theme to which the artist refers in her work. Here, the spider is moving around a space resembling boudoir, sliding across a pink fabric, getting tangled in pearls, walking across the bed and the wall. The huge bird spider is appropriating the space, causing threat and dominating the interior, like the dragonfly in the garden in Józef Mehoffer’s Dziwny ogród [Strange Garden]. Its presence can probably be interpreted as an expression of an unconscious fear.

But the hairy monster only seems to be in contrast to the sugary interior. The opposition of beauty versus ugliness seems to be insufficient, if we were to describe the situation recorded by Burska. The spider is as beautiful as the room is ominous. The artist has often shown the closeness between the beautiful and the repulsive – as in the case of Algorytm [Algorithm] (2002), where a photograph of a peony has been juxtaposed against shots of an amputated leg. The ambiguity of emotions towards the beauty and the ugliness finds reflection in the ambivalence of the meanings associated with a spider. A spider’s web is both a network of dreams and a trap. Beauty is the unattainable ideal, but it is also a phantasm and a pitfall. Burska plays with associations. She picks out different references from the memory of the viewer which force one to see the beauty not so much in the categories of esthetic pleasure as in a sublime experience, revealing the contradictory image of the reality.

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