ADA KARCZMARCZYK. Just Love Me

“JUST LOVE ME”

Why can’t Ada find a boyfriend? What’s wrong with her?

What is wrong is that she has always been able to love only conjectural men. This is because a conjecture is the easiest to impose your own pattern upon; then you fill the lacunae with whatever you wish. Afterward you love this pattern, because it is exactly the way you like it to be. And the more you differ from the status quo of your peer group, the more difficult it is to find someone that would fit this pattern. 

Heroes of novels and films, performers, geniuses, great masters, philosophers, moral leaders, men from the world of art and show-business, artists – dead, most of them, or utterly unreachable – accompany Ada throughout her life almost like real partners. Some are more ordinary, but only until she encounters them. Then her imagination switches to another conjecture, easy to model in her head like a work of art, in exactly the same way she models all her artwork. Ada loves those conjectural men and belongs to them only as long as they give her hope for Great Love, in which Ada naively believes, fooling herself that then she would feel the need to understand her. She lives with them, or rather with their imagined minds, as she would live with real human beings: eats breakfast with them, goes for walks, holds long conversations, asks their advice, and they always answer with some wise thing, they guide her, comfort her…They are, in a word, ideal. At times she grows so attached to them, or feels so lonely, that she believes that they are the only ones who are able to comprehend her way of thinking. But when she makes an effort to seize a man who materializes in reality, her fear of nullifying the images gets the better of her and Ada withdraws back to the cage created by her own imagination. She never meets her conjectural men physically; yet she loves them unconditionally and trusts them only, even though they do not exist in reality, they are figments of her imagination: sometimes slightly dangerous, sometimes funny, sometimes a little sad…

The exhibition “JUST LOVE ME” is an overview of the moods of a dreamer and inveterate romantic, her ways of describing her condition and her reflection on the true essence of love. It is an attempt at defining the relationship with her own fantasies, at diagnosing her mental penchant for spinning platonic scenarios and establishing an attitude towards that predilection. It is certainly an self-therapeutic exhibition that may help Ada to define her persistent fantasy of love and finally vanquish it. Yet will Ada manage to finally wake up and learn to fall in love with living, real men? Will she shake off this amorous lethargy focused on imaginary lovers? One thing is certain: seeing the exhibition will be helpful in finding an efficacious remedy for this strange and dire affliction.

Ada Karczmarczyk

translated from the Polish by Klaudyna Michałowicz
 

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