Magdalena Łazarczyk A wing moved by fingers

11.09 – 06.11.2020 Magdalena Łazarczyk A wing moved by fingers

Zachęta Project Room

ZPR curator: Magda Kardasz
collaboration: Monika Kopczewska

Places on the outskirts of the city, abandoned and forgotten, are governed by their own laws. The objects accumulated there pile up in layers, their destiny changes or disappears completely as a result of transformations; time flows differently. Decomposition and recomposition, reshaping of fragments, mysterious sounds closed in a cycle that seems to last forever. Places that are diverse and dynamic on the one hand, and on the other, filled with peace and emptiness. Their incredible atmosphere attracts attention, evokes anxiety, forces us to ask questions that are difficult to answer, leaving a feeling of insatiability and pushing for further exploration.

When you want to capture their image, it is impossible to show all the sides, layers and combinations at once. The artist, while making videos, captures individual fragments of reality, which she then combines, trying to present the space around her as broadly as possible. In effect, she creates her own configurations, which we also see in her collages and assemblages. Photos from antique shop albums are interspersed in unusual combinations with found, abandoned objects. Every person (including the artist and the viewer) is also subordinate to these processes, being at the same time a creator and an object of transformation, subordinate to entropy. The hands that appear symbolise an attempt to interfere and the power of agency — the fingers move the inert wing, awakening it to a new life.


photo Łukasz Sosiński

Works on exhibition

  • Zdjęcie pracy Magdalena Łazarczyk, A wing moved by fingers, installation, 2020
    Magdalena Łazarczyk, A wing moved by fingers, installation, 2020
  • Zdjęcie pracy Magdalena Łazarczyk, A wing moved by fingers, collage 30x30, 2020
    Magdalena Łazarczyk, A wing moved by fingers, collage 30x30, 2020
  • Zdjęcie pracy Magdalena Łazarczyk, A wing moved by fingers, collage 30x30, 2020
    Magdalena Łazarczyk, A wing moved by fingers, collage 30x30, 2020
  • Zdjęcie pracy Magdalena Łazarczyk, A wing moved by fingers, collage 30x30, 2020
    Magdalena Łazarczyk, A wing moved by fingers, collage 30x30, 2020
  • Zdjęcie pracy Magdalena Łazarczyk, A wing moved by fingers, film still, 2020
    Magdalena Łazarczyk, A wing moved by fingers, film still, 2020
About the artist
Magdalena Łazarczyk

(1985) is involved in film, photography, collages and installations. She deals with the subject of human relations with the surrounding world, she is interested in the distance between a sign, an object and its notion, function and place in the system. She’s inspired by the world of things. A graduate of photography at the University of Arts in Poznań (2013) and media art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, she graduated from Mirosław Bałka’s Studio of Spatial Activities (2015). Her diploma work was awarded at the Coming Out 2015 exhibition and received the main prize at the (NIE)OBECNOŚĆ exhibition organised by the Labyrinth Gallery in Lublin (2017). Together with Zuza Golińska, she forms the performative duo TWINS. Together with Łukasz Sosiński, she runs ROD — Realny Obszar Działań [Real Activity Area] — an artist-run-space in the Family Allotment Gardens in Warsaw. She lives and works in Warsaw.

Selected exhibitions:
Other Ways of Watching Together, Showroom MAMA, Rotterdam, 2020; Animation Beyond Cinema, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2019; Project X, Zachęta — National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, 2019; Force Field, Officine 800, Giudecca, Venice, 2019; What You Learned from Facebook, CCA, Tbilisi, 2018; No-Man’s Land, Labirynt Gallery, Lublin, 2018; Invisible Wall, Arsenał Gallery in Białystok, 2017; Hosted Simply, Vienna, 2016; The Sense of the Body, FISAD 2015, Turin, 2015; Goosebumps, Polish Word House, Warsaw, 2015; Myths. Students/Artists/Teachers, Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, Rome, 2014; Lesson, Zachęta Project Room, Warsaw, 2014.

Seemingly there is a problem

Seemingly there is a problem. I think hard about it, but I don’t know it. I have a sense of it and some ideas about it. I keep looking for it, but it’s nowhere to be found. When I look around, my inner life looks at itself in objects.

There are misunderstandings all around me. It’s all connected to my case, or it has nothing to do with it at all. It can’t decide whether it’s important to me or completely meaningless. I suspect that my surroundings want to tell me something about myself, but they don’t say it directly. For example, the things I look at, or the things I take into my hands — all of this activates something in me, but I don’t know what it activates. It seems that everything has been turned upside down, it makes me feel incomplete. Some terms are reaching me, but they don’t have a clear origin; instead, they have an obvious delay. They predict what is happening, suggest there will be an important event, that the solution is close. They promise much but fail to satisfy. They explicate much but explain little.
There is a problem, that much is certain. I suspect it may not be true, and yet I feel its consequences.

There are entire weeks when nothing happens, and there are moments in which a week’s worth of happening takes place. Not all days look the same. My surroundings are still full of ambiguities, but sometimes there is a chance of a clear change. 
Sometimes I get the feeling that my surroundings are ready to treat me in a particular way. They still resist, but without much conviction, as if ready to give up. They almost seem to be opening up. It’s as if thinking takes place in the same material my surroundings are made of, in a language I don’t know. And when I look around, I feel a kind of initiation — I don’t know into what yet, but I truly feel it. And when I look at this thing, for example, and take this object in my hands, none of this seems to matter anymore. Everything seems like something that had to have happened to me. And when I look around, I see a growing tendency to agree on distant qualities. Everything begins to associate with everything else, connecting sufficiently. There are no more side motives, it is no longer possible to separate what is on topic from what is off topic. And even when I know I’m mistaking something for something else, I don’t feel like I’m wrong. And even when I see things where they’re not, I’m sure it makes sense.
These are special moments. They never last long. As soon as this sense of self begins to thicken, I stop recognising myself in my impressions. When I look around, everything still appears to me at once, but not together. One feeling encounters the opposite feeling, each one goes in a different direction. Directions stop agreeing, things start staggering. When everything finally starts to connect, it starts to fall apart right away. Everything is so ‘maybe’ already, all around me are only undecided facts, only misunderstandings. I only know there’s a problem, but I don’t even know anything about it.

And so I spend my days looking for something I don’t know. What I pick up is not what I reach for. The problem keeps shifting. Even if I found something, I wouldn’t find anything. The real solution lies somewhere else than I expect.

Łukasz Rodziewicz

Guided tour in Polish Sign Language

00:00/00:00
Related media
  • Grafika obiektu: 3D Exhibition: Magdalena Łazarczyk
    mediateka / 3D documentation
    3D Exhibition: Magdalena Łazarczyk
    A wing moved by fingers
  • Grafika obiektu: Seemingly there is a problem
    mediateka / folders / Texts
    Seemingly there is a problem
    Łukasz Rodziewicz
  • Grafika obiektu: Magdalena Łazarczyk
    mediateka / posters
    Magdalena Łazarczyk
    A wing moved by fingers
  • Grafika obiektu: Magdalena Łazarczyk
    mediateka / video-documentation
    Magdalena Łazarczyk
    A wing moved by fingers
Related events
  • 03.10.2020 (Sat) 18:00
    Magdalena Łazarczyk. A wing moved by fingers
    Guided tour in Polish
    Zachęta Project RoomZPR
  • 10.11.2020 (Tue) 18:00
    Bushes and wastelands. The strength of the third landscape
    A meeting accompanying the exhibition of Magdalena Łazarczyk (in Polish)
    Zachęta Project Room Facebook Zachęta Project Room Facebook
  • 22.11.2020 (Sun) 11:00
    Magdalena Łazarczyk. A wing moved by fingers
    Artist's online tour
    Zachęta's FacebookZachęta's Facebook

Information

Magdalena Łazarczyk
A wing moved by fingers
11.09 – 06.11.2020

Zachęta Project Room
ul. Gałczyńskiego 3, 00-362 Warsaw
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Godziny otwarcia:
tuesday–Sunday 12–8 p.m.
free entry