Elżbieta Jabłońska (2021):
When together with Emilia Orzechowska we worked on the exhibition in Łaźnia a year ago, a text was written too. With time, it was becoming less and less accurate. We are publishing the whole text below. We would like to highlight the changes which we have introduced now through the crossings-out. Last year took us far away from the original concept, which will remain uncompleted. The curatorial text underwent DEconstruction.
Emilia Orzechowska (2020): DISAPPEARING/REconstruction is another part of last year’s exhibition by Elżbieta Jabłońska which took place in TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art in Szczecin. This time, as a reference to the period between the two events, the author makes an attempt to redefine the title “disappearing”. With the use of some elements from the Szczecin exhibit, in a changed form, she focuses on overwriting the content and shifting meanings.
The artist is known for her pieces and actions based on the observation of the reality which is the closest to her. Her triptych Supermother, her Is Your Mind Full of Good? neon or the self-portraits from the Scribble Over Me series were made in collaboration with her sons. Now, just as in the case of the above-mentioned projects, Jabłońska elaborates on her son’s quote found in the family archive: „Nothingness is all that does not exist and everything that exists is nothingness. Nothingness is like a whirlpool which constantly sucks things in”.
As a result, another installation which consists of several elements, was made. It refers both to the quoted phrase and the place where the artist has lived for over a decade. The landscape which surrounds her and, above all, a unique kind of distancing, are the reason for a kind of conscious resignation or even doubt, which leads to a form of “a personal abandonment”, which she has been practising by the Vistula river, at its 788th kilometre. As she herself declares: “You could say that I have disappeared by this river, that it has become my obsession, that the place has sucked me in.” It is not easy to translate the state and landscape she creates into a visual language. How to close the unlimited space of the earth, the sky and water? How to show a constant change?
Elżbieta Jabłońska is an artist whose work has earned its own important position in Polish contemporary art. She mainly creates installations, photographs, films, performances or space and time-based activities. She is an independent and somewhat rebellious artist who eludes all attempts to fit her work into the current of socially engaged, participatory, critical art or to classify it as feminist or post-feminist art.
Ela Jabłońska’s art is the kind of reflection on the world around us and ourselves which involves a lot of humility and honesty towards the everyday, mundane life. It is the “life” with a capital “L” that she turns into art. The seemingly trivial, unimportant and, in some sense, invisible or transparent matters are the material of which she creates her “home” or life art. As she does this, she says “she is convinced that what matters the most in life is life”. She tries to make her audience aware of this and remind them about it every step of the way.
Elżbieta Jabłońska (2021):
As I started working on the exhibition again, searched the information about the history of the gallery’s building and focused on its primary function, I decided to subject the exhibition space to visual and sound examination. The historical seems particularly important in the face of the latest social and climate problems. Using the gesture of a certain “Reconstruction” allowed us to not only make a reference to the past but also to show the “uncertain” future prospects.