Let’s make miłość
Alicja Biała, Maja Janczar, Gosia Kołdraszewska, Jan Możdżyński, Zofia Pałucha, Patryk Różycki
4 October -- 2 November 2024
miłość gallery
29 Downham Road, N1 5AA
PV: 3 Oct 6-9pm
Let’s make miłość is an introduction to miłość’s programme, an exhibition focused on Polish art that sits in opposition to the status quo and examines the oppression imposed by normativity in the context of Polish and East-Central-European culture. The works, ranging from paintings to etchings and sculpture, explore oppositional experiences – experiences of navigating oppression and liberation, of love, care and compassion. The artists create in the contexts of Polish Christian hetero-patriarchy, while highlighting oppositional histories and re-examining relationships with heritage, nature, home, queerness, and femininity.
Gosia Kołdraszewska’s diptych welcomes you to miłość with a camp image of Poland – its romantic rural landscapes haunted by oppressive tropes, spectres of Catholicism and repressed innuendos. Gosia visualizes the borrowed aspirations for pomp and greatness in the aesthetics or rural Poland, stuck in the narrative of vibrant capitalism of the 90s. What she describes as ‘the Polish tendency for nostalgia’ produces plastic iterations of national cultural symbols
– roadside shrines with neon crosses, dubious souvenirs – and mixes them with characters taken from Western pop-culture, covering the landscape with a satirical layer of garish decoration.
Zofia Pałucha’s recent body of work navigates the intersection of personal experience and political commentary through a distinctly digital lens, recontextualising found imagery. In Trafficker’s Friends and Business Partners – a title taken from an article about Jeffrey Epstein – she depicts a group of young sex-workers captured by the police. The painting’s negative rendering speaks to a tradition in art history where women sex-workers were most often depicted by men. This change in perspective, a point of view of compassion rather than domination, highlights the dichotomy of subjectivity and objectivity of the contemporary realities of sex work.
A similar tension is visible in Jan Możdżyński’s paintings and sculpture, which present characters and elements from his creation of the vaginal circus. The circus, traditionally associated with presentations of peculiarities, pretences and curiosities, becomes the home of freaks and queers and (sexual) ambiguity. Jan draws parallels between the female body and the circus, both arenas of strife and battle, both a spectacle. He plays with performativity, with binaries, fear, sex and fetishes, and it remains unclear whether this performance is voluntarily and what our role is as audience.
Patryk Różycki practices a lightness in his representations, contextualising the subject with titles and text. Here, he shows three paintings from a large autobiographical series which delves into his family life, growing up and discovering his sexuality. The works examine three dimensions of queerness and oppositionality – in Talking to My Mother About Sex, Patryk tells the story of rediscovering a friendship with his mother over telling her about his Tinder dates, prompting her to tell him her own stories; My Bum re-examines his relationship with his own body, conditioned by oversexualised masculine beautystandards and peer pressure, while At confession I told the priest that I was masturbating, he was angry with me and shouted at me shows a moment where he was forced to confront how the Church policed, and continues to police, sexual expression. This individual, personal story, of coming to terms with and facing one’s sexuality – at home, at church, and with oneself – becomes a crucial, relatable illustration of an experience of queerness in Poland.
In All About Love, bell hooks writes about the importance of the creation of a home, a space for oneself as a crucial act of self-care, especially for those of us systemically denied care. Maja Janczar explores home-making and care in her new works, which use tea towels as canvas, and in this context, on plates, presents human and non-human symbiotic relationships – love and polyculture. She extends the love ethic towards nature – while hooks speaks of love as the opposite of domination, in Marsh Labrador Tea, Maja shows a plant whose properties were exploited, which now needs to be protected.
In Alicja Biała’s art, this relation to nature is visible both in the subject and the technique, with the artist using mining waste to develop her etchings. Alicja speaks of being raised in the centre of a multi-generational dialogue which informs her practice that delves into cultural pasts, migration and displacements, Slavic identities and folk traditions. Themes of paganism, existing in harmony with nature, bring about a sense of cyclicality and humility which challenges the values historically dominating Europe and its practices of exploitation of nature and extractivism. Playing with clichés, Alicja offers a humorous interpretation of a cultural past that’s both personal and oppositional.
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View the press release [PDF].