edited by: Ewa Witkowska
graphic design: Grzegorz Laszuk
publisher: Zachęta - Narodowa Galeria Sztuki
ISBN: 978-83-60713-03-7

´I met M a few years ago, but I don't know what has happened to him since. In February I departed for Ireland and took his poem and play with me. In Cork I often went to the deserted old psychiatric hospital Our Lady's Hospital of 1852, and its St. Kevin's Ward, which for 4 years stands empty …210 deserted rooms. The last patient left its walls in April 2002. In April 2006 I saw a person there with a dog, lying on a bench. Later on there was only the dog…The dog was taken by dogcatchers on May 6, 2006" – these words, spoken by the protagonist of Anna Konik’s film Our Lady’s Forever, are part of the artist’s own story. Several years ago she met a young man suffering from schizophrenia who gave her the text of a play he had written. The play is a kind of a love story, a story about the dream to change physically into the person one loves. It is full of strange images born in the author’s over-sensitiv mind. The artist took the play with her when she was leaving, in spring 2006 to Cork in Ireland. There she discovered Our Lady’s, an abandoned psychiatric hospital, where she made her film Our Lady’s Forever, to be presented as a multi-channel single-screen video installation. The film is a story with no beginning or end, showing two persons – a man and a woman – called A and M, searching for each other, wandering around the empty corridors and rooms of the dilapidating building. The scenes, illuminated with strange, blue light, are a blend of reality and abstraction, of the real-world and the imaginary, and the whole film is mysterious and oblique. Our Lady’s Forever is the most poetic of Anna Konik’s works so far, but also dealing with similar issues of alienation, strange sensitivity or loneliness as her earlier works, Toys, Transparency, or In the Middle of the Way.