Break

Break is one of several works dating from the early 1990s, in which Hanna Łuczak attempted to show the essence of the state of suspension. Those installations were often described as the “spheres of waiting”, “cumulated potentiality” and “contemplation of the zero point”. In these works, Łuczak attempts to materialise the situation of nothing happening, to display the moment of inner silence and to define its meanings. The viewer is confronted with a space in which Łuczak had, in a sense, managed to arrest the passage of reality, as if she had stopped the hands of a clock and subjected the surrounding objects to a momentary paralysis.

Łuczak creates inertia by means of objects. She accentuates their characteristic condition of inanimate matter, temporarily depriving them of their cultural role of active subjects/objects of social life. The harmonious composition, all the elements of which are mutually equal and create a formally as well as semantically coherent arrangement, serves to convey the state of coma. Stools, chained together and placed on tables, are a visual expression of immobility and inertia.

The situation created by Łuczak is realised only with the participation of the viewer. Its completing element is the subjective experience of stagnation, a disruption in the fluency of perception, forced upon the viewer by the suggestiveness of the work or arising from his/her emotional condition. Chains used in the installation provoke questions as to the cause of this state, pointing to its external determinants. The absence of action is shown as akin to absence of freedom, and the inner silence with being silenced. The entrance into the sphere of silence does not seem a voluntary act, a conscious switch-off of sensitivity to stimuli or a nirvana-like dissolution. In the face of the installation, the titular break, a withdrawal from the external world, is not only freedom from desires, but also an inner exile and a pathological  retraction into oneself.

Izabela Kopania
translated from Polish by Klaudyna Michałowicz

photo Jan Szewczyk

photo Jan Szewczyk

photo Jan Szewczyk