Habitat

The work HAUS from the Letters series and the two versions of Habitat from the Structures series, all belonging to the greater Kinderturnen cycle that unites all the series, share a source of inspiration. Patrycja Orzechowska has referred to the book Kinderturnen: eine Übungssammlung in Bildern, über die Verwendung der Turn- und Gymnastikgeräte im Kindergarten (Children’s Gymnastics: A Collection of Photographs Illustrating the Use of Exercise Equipment in Kindergartens) by Margot and Ursula Kriesel, published in East Berlin in 1955.

The concept of referring to a handbook of gymnastics is not new; suffice it to mention Exercises for Balance by Karol Radziszewski (2007, Collection II of the Arsenal Gallery in Białystok). Constructing her works, Orzechowska draws from a vast repository of images. Apart from the obvious inspiration provided by the photographs illustrating gymnastic exercises, the jumble of paper furniture in the Habitat by Katarzyna Józefowicz (1993–6, Collection II) is worth recalling in this context. Associations with Eadwaerd Muybridge’s photographic frames registering motion sequences or the less obvious references to Lamprey’s grid, a simple tool for making anthropometric measurements invented for use in British physical anthropology, are also difficult to escape. Orzechowska seems to be working in the copy-paste technique, one symptomatic to, for instance, today’s journalism. Yet she is creative in her copying; the resulting collages constitute a new quality. Her method is based on multiplying and inscribing a body in various structures, cages, skeletons of architectural forms and constructions of letters. One of such sets constitutes the word “HAUS”, referring to the disciplining role performed by the institution of home.

According of the authors of the German handbook, their guidelines were to help in bringing up the children to become thoroughly well-developed, healthy, courageous and responsible young people. Their declaration now seems a naive postulate of social eugenics. It is additionally burdened by the fact that the photographed exercises were performed by children from a children’s home. The concept of shaping the society by subordinating the body and psyche to a process of formation, inherent in the program of any authority, is here particularly remorseless. Does Orzechowska’s work signify that the language through which we might speak of this problem is by now exhausted? Is the practice of copying images the most communicative one in this case? Is the subject of drill exercises that had for decades been internalized still pertinent and as potent as it once had been?