ANETA GRZESZYKOWSKA – Anagrams

ANAGRAMS

In an anagram all the elements exist in a simultaneous relationship. […] nothing is future and nothing is past; nothing is old and nothing is new… except, perhaps, the anagram itself

Maya Deren, An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film

We can safely say that the senses are the main subject of interest for Aneta Grzeszykowska. In particular, she is intrigued by the gaze and its power or, more generally, the sensuality of the body, its autonomy with respect to what we have come to dub “I,” its ways and forms of being in the world. This is not all, though. More recently, the artist’s repository of images has focused on time as a category that is both central to our experience and volatile and elusive. She is especially interested in moments of suspension of clearly defined borderlines between the present and the past and demonstrates how the two overlap.

The presentation of the artist’s work from the last few years in Galeria Arsenał introduces us into a uniquespace that disrupts any and all continuities of time, narration, identity, body and object. For example, they vanish into the blackness that dissolves all that is temporal and that fills the space of the Headache film (2008), chronologically the first work on display. The blackness, which we can read as a space of a dream or unconsciousness, provides a backdrop for the spectacle of autonomy of the artist’s body,         a unique fantasy of a body that is and is not one’s own, but also of a body taken possession of by a gaze.

The Black Background (2009) is an intriguing pendant to the above film. It is a large abstract tondo created by means of ruffling a huge sheet of black fabric that serves as a background in a few black movies by Grzeszykowska. It brings out a special spatiality of blackness, which is simultaneously perfectly flat and infinitely deep, full of folds and creases.

This space was transformed into something far more technical and thus all the more unsettling in another film, Holes (2011), where the artist’s body appears in fragments, “laid out” on a sterile white surface of something resembling a table from an editor’s room or an anatomy lab; it is a kind of anatomy of desire.

Another motif is contained in works where the artist enters into a dialogue with her predecessors and where the past gets updated in the present perception. Here, too, desire is replaced by love as an element which both consumes and saves. This motif becomes visible in the collages of the Love Book series (2010), where in a loving embrace the artist “devours” her predecessors, artists who created an art forgotten by feminism, on the one hand appropriating their legacy and on another hand reinstating this legacy in the present day.

However, the central element of the show is the premiere presentation of the sound added to the legendary At Land by an avant-garde shaman-artist Maya Deren. Deren’s “figured philosophy of vision,” embodied in her self-ethnographic work where the artist’s body remains suspended between the objective and the subjective, seems a perfect reference point for Aneta Grzeszykowska, whose interests focus on similar issues. Her extremely subtle yet engrossing interference into Deren’s work fleshes it out with a “body,” irreversibly dragging us into its world. Ultimately, it is hard to determine where in this “inverted odyssey via the unstable relativistic universe of the twentieth century,” as the author called her movie, Maya Deren ends and Aneta Grzeszykowska begins.

In Aneta Grzeszykowska’s unique space we read “now” via “then,” a fragment starts to function in isolation from the whole, a separate being, while literally construed time is subject to dismantling and re-configuration. This is the space of art that is artificial as it is tangible and topical. And in this sense it is extremely true.