Wounds

Rarely is matter in its most organic form felt as strongly as in the works of Iza Tarasewicz. Its presence is often announced in the titles that the artist gives to her works – as in the exhibition Brawn put on at the Galeria Arsenał in Białystok. The title, meaning “meat from a pig’s head which is obtained once the brain, ears, tongue, and eyes are separated; treated as second class food”, has already imposed a certain interpretation of her works.

One such work is Wounds, including oblong objects with a long orifice and a hole on the side, placed in a grey cardboard box. The piece was made from pig bladders, which are very much in line with the repertory of the artist, which also includes fat, skin, bowels, wax, or yeast dough. However, the matter in the works of Tarasewicz, though shown very explicitly, goes beyond itself and becomes an expression of the spiritual condition. The organic remains, cut off and prepared, are a reference to wounds, scars, and the impairments of the psyche. By using the mechanisms of abject art, and by visualizing what had been rejected from the reflection on the body and matter, the artist seems to be resorting to similar exclusions in the psychological sphere. The relations between the body and soul have again been shown not as a dualism but as a close interdependence. The Wounds are indeed open wounds – vulnera aperta – and refer to all that is related to destruction: the maltreatment of the body, the self-destruction of self-analysis, the shattered psyche.

One other element that has been noticed in the works of Tarasewicz, is the question of the relations between the human and the animal – the issue of violence, the torturer and the victim. It is linked with another motif which is just as important – the experience of her childhood spent in a village near the town of Białystok. Many of Tarasewicz’s sculptures and installations reverberate both with the directness of the perspective of what is disgusting and repulsive, as well as with a contradictory attitude towards animals – exploiting their bodies and strength on the one hand, and benefiting from very close contact with them on the other. The artist does not try to resolve these conflicts, leaving the wounds open.

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