Głosy/Voices

The brief takes composing the video Voices by Aleksander Komarov do not constitute a coherent narrative. Recorded as if by a hidden camera, they create an image of a small community, which is interesting from the sociological point of view. The artist collected the material for the work in the town of Nowy Sącz, rich with the living heritage of Galicia – the multicultural creation of the Habsburg policy. Komarov is interested in religion as an element of life. He studies it from the perspective of the community, as well as its members. Religiousness in the theological sense, however, is not attractive to him, nor does he try to trace the relations between religion and politics. The eye of the camera stops whenever religion makes an unobvious intersection with the daily life or with events important from the perspective of social identity.

In the church of St Elisabeth in Nowy Sącz, the artist films a nun cleaning up the temple and a maintenance man tuning the grand church organs. The artist then inserts a piece of an old documentary video showing the celebration of placing the figure of a falcon on the tympanum of the “Sokół” [Falcon] Gymnastics Society in 1993, which begins with the consecration of the figure in the church. Just as carefully, he observes a small choir boy practicing a church hymn – dressed, by the way, in a shirt patterned with skulls. He also watches a crowd of churchgoers leaving after mass on Palm Sunday, or participating in the Way of the Cross. Seemingly banal activities happening in the sacral space gain in Komarov’s works the significance of quotidian rituals; the religious rites, when present in public space, become social gestures, and events which are basically secular gain a liturgical setting.

In Voices, religion is intertwined with social life in every moment. The organs are the visual, metaphorical connection between these spheres: in the first minutes of the film – the church organs, and in the final sequences – the organs in one of the halls of the building of the Society. Komarov does not pose direct questions about faith and its relevance to social life, however the very issue seems to be of key importance in the work. In many moments, what seems to be suggested is the symbolic presence of religion and its important role in organizing social life, introducing order in both the private and the public domain.

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