Zachęta Project Room

artists: Karolina Bielawska, Magdalena Golba, Zuza Golińska i Magdalena Łazarczyk
curator: Magda Kardasz

LESSON is a week-long exhibition by Karolina Bielawska, Magdalena Golba, Zuza Golińska, and Magdalena Łazarczyk.

LESSON refers to a traditionally understood formal interaction between teacher and student. Yet it can also acquire additional meanings, such as drawing conclusions from particular situations or as participation in didactic process.

We get LESSONs every day in the long process of education, which begins in the kindergarten. LESSONs are given by teachers, family, friends, even life. For LESSONs we can be prepared or not; we can either succeed or fail; we can obey or rebel. The meaning of LESSON frequently goes beyond the school or university context. LESSON simultaneously presupposes open-mindedness, willingness to learn as well as submission and faith in authority.

Four final-year students of the Warsaw School of Fine Arts confront the titular LESSON. They analyse the subject of nostalgia and memories, examine the general phenomenon of education, its meaning and dynamics. Their final year is also a year of review, an account of losses and gains undergone in the process of education.

Karolina Bielawska in her painting Beginning/End presents desire to escape adultness marked with long years of education and inculcated social rules. A weightlessly hanging pair of child’s legs can stand for carefreeness, blissful doing-nothing or resignation and fatigue. Subtle colours represent innocence and the fleeting childhood at the same time. The Hippocampus video shows an underwater exotic world in a slowed-down pace. Hippocampus is a Latin term for seahorse but also a part of cerebral cortex, mainly responsible for memory. This work, on the one hand, refers to dreams of discovering the world and, on the other, to memory or, rather, laborious and time-consuming process of remembering (so important in studying).

Immensely popular, especially in primary school, was collecting stickers, postcards, sheets of paper – small or binder-size, with cartoon heroes, singers or actors. This became a starting point for Zuza Golińska, who notices that this innocent gathering quickly turns into collecting. A collection gets bigger and bigger, and new binders, albums and shelves are indispensable. Thus also begins a conscious selection, exchange and comparison of collections. The School Activities is the return to the first, inexistent by now collections, and an attempt to create them again but from today’s perspective.

Magdalena Golba in the DETENTION installation returns to an old form of punishment of disobedient children. The length of detention as a means of discipline depended on the seriousness of misdeed and would go on for a couple of hours to days. In the contemporary education system, the use of such punishment is forbidden and teachers are frequently powerless about the aggressiveness of their pupils. Magdalena Golba problematizes the function of authority and its possibilities in the time of “no stress education”. At the same time she critically examines the education model which constrains child’s individuality and promotes socially accepted types of behaviour.

Listen to me, Magdalena Łazarczyk’s piece, uses a stool that she found in the street. It refers to school desk, associated with order, discipline, immobility. The stool becomes an object of examination of endurance, tension and compliance with external force. Another work, video Pretence, shows a person sitting motionless in front of a wall on which shadows fall from behind the window. This “natural projection”, slowly changing in time and space, refers to Plato’s idea of shadows that provokes considerations of the realness of the visible world.

Karolina Bielawska – born 1986 in Olsztyn. Studies at the Department of Media Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. In 2013 she was awarded a BA degree with Dean’s honours in the Painting Space Studio of Leon Tarasewicz and Paweł Susid. Graduated from Polish Studies at the University of Warsaw. In her works she uses painting, drawing, photography and installation.

Magdalena Rua Golba – born 1985 in Łuków. Studies Media Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. In 2013 she received BA degree in the Painting Space Studio of Leon Tarasewicz and Paweł Susid. Finalist of Hestia Artistic Journey (2014).

Zuza Golińska – born 1990 in Gdańsk. Studies Media Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. In 2013 she received BA degree in the Painting Space Studio of Leon Tarasewicz and Paweł Susid. She uses different media such as painting, photography, drawing and sculpting and creates installations. Finalist of Hestia Artistic Journey (2014) and the Gdańsk Art Biennale (2014).

Magdalena Łazarczyk – born 1985 in Białystok. Graduated from Cultural Studies at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań and photography at the University of Arts in Poznań. She is currently studying New Media Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. In her works she uses video, photography, installation. Finalist of Hestia Artistic Journey (2014) and Polish Biennale of Young Art “Rybie Oko” (2013).