ALICJA BIELAWSKA – Adopted shapes

An exhibition „Adopted Shapes” presents the latest cycle of sculptures by Alicja Bielawska. The works displayed together create half-known constellations of objects with unspecified purpose. A curtain, furniture, a balustrade, bars undergo the transformation, altering their initial shape, context and function. The experienceof material and confrontation with the size of works allow viewers to build a personal relationship between one’s body and an object. The works made of cheap materials in a perverse way correspond to the objects in the human environment, constituting the variations on perception and memory of everyday life.

My works relate to everyday objects and play with their functions and viewers’ expectations. Yes, I like to see my works as objects, not sculptures – claims the artist. […] Every object is independent. I will show them together, but it doesn’t mean that they constitute one work. They are separate works that are related in some way. At this point, they need each other.¹

According to Piotr Kowalik, in the practice of Alicja Bielawska the selection of materials plays the key role. Some of them are imitation or substitute for other materials (plastic laminate or synthetic veneer that mimics the look of wood). Whereas starched fabric has association with hospital or bedroom intimacy, cleanness and safety, but also discipline andbourgeois hypocrisy. Bielawska also uses other materials – cardboard, metal, timber, cotton, plaster or wax – the materials a bit unspecific. They are everywhere in our lives, although they usually fail to attract our attention. To some extent, they evoke homely associations, but not immediately. There is an air of ambivalence about them. On the one hand, materials used in her works invite personal response, as if toward something that may co-exist with our own memories, with our experience. On the other hand, their neutrality brings out indifference. The experience may just as well be somebody else’s, impenetrable for us. Similar ambivalence may be traced in the way the works are constructed. Skeletons of wood or metal, naked or covered, sometimes look familiar – like a book shelf, a window shade, a table, but proportions are alien, or materials question the suggested function. Bielawska’s works immediately suggest human being as a scale of reference […].²

This imitation of human height as well as body proportions (horizontal elements determine hypothetical divisions to head-torso or torso-legs) in the works, in an obvious way assumes the interaction or integration of the viewers into the objects – to a degree far more advanced that it would result from “normal” relationship between a viewer and an artwork. Piotr Kowalik writes: Inside the gallery there are scenes enacted, in which the sculptures become artifacts in the scenery projecting their meaning onto the actors-viewers. The motion, changing positions, unplanned choreography – all of these aspects enhance the insufficiency of sculptures and bring out their dependency upon human presence, without it, although attractive in form, they remain incomplete. Thus the body becomes a party, an additional material.

¹Tobias Karlsson, A conversation at a kitchen table. Interview with Alicja Bielawska published in the exhibition folder Alicja Bielawska. The Revolutions of Things, CCA Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw 2010.

²Piotr Kowalik, Under the circumstances… Text published in the exhibition catalogue Alicja Bielawska. – I feel I forgot something. – I think you remember too much. Czarna Gallery, Warsaw 2010.

³Ibidem.

Alicja Bielawska(1980) – a graduate of Art History at the University of Warsaw and Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Participant of the European Exchange Academy in Beelitz (Germany). A scholarship holder of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (2012). Her works were presented at the solo and group exhibitions in Poland, the Netherlands and Germany. She works with sculptures, installations, drawings and writes poetry. Lives and works in Warsaw and Amsterdam. Viewers of the Arsenal Gallery had a possibility to see her works: Revolution of things (blankets) andWe wake up early to watch the sunrise at the exhibition „The Journey to the East” in 2011.