Venue: GGM1, ul. Piwna 27/29
Opening: 13th January 2017, 7:30 PM
Exhibition: 13th January – 26th February 2017
Curator: Mariola Balińska
Zuzanna Janin’s exhibition Seven Fathers. Seven Dances presents the artist’s latest sculptural projects, drawings, collages and video works created in the recent three years. The show explores the crossroads of the private and collective memory; Janin evokes fragments of her personal memory and offers them a universal dimension through the prism of such notions as masculinity, fatherhood, patriotism, manhood and historic memory. Pursuing retrospections, returns and temporal loops, the artist analyses these notions anew and asks about their significance and universality in contemporary culture.
The sculptural installation Seven Fathers (2014) is composed of small-scale statues of men set on oak tree trunks; sculpted from memory, they represent the “father” figures – from the biological father, to the step-father, fathers-in-law, godfather and adoptive fathers – made of transparent epoxide resin. The installation is accompanied by a frieze of drawings-letters, written by the artist to each of the men, which also evoke historical circumstances, wars and totalitarianism that shape the life stories and private acts of people, laying bare their weak and strong sides, sometimes weaknesses and fears. The work is highly personal, and yet as the artist evokes both present and absent men in her memories, she challenges these relations by adopting a critical perspective on stereotypical masculinity and shapes the memory of older men in their sometimes labile sense of fatherhood. A relationship between an older man and a woman his daughter’s age is also the topic of the artist’s most recent work The Last Bath of an Elderly Man (2016), which is the reverse of the iconic motif of Susanna and the Elders.
The exhibition also comprises a series of collages Insurgents, Survivors and the Team (1863–2016), which originate from 19th century academic drawings of naked models created by the artist’s great-great-grandfather, the painter and draughtsman Ignacy Jasiński, imprisoned and exiled to Russia for his participation in the January Uprising. Classic drawings, images of old-time heroes – patriots, insurgents – are juxtaposed with press clippings from 20th century newspapers that show the images of men from the world of popular culture, commonly recognised as symbols of masculinity, models of a modern man (David Bowie, Brad Pitt, Pelé), or half-naked supporters at football matches. The dialogue between the past and the present draws the artist’s attention to the old-time and current perception of manhood.
Janin’s perspective is both that of poetic adoration and a rigid message. It is her who controls and holds power over the images of the memory of older men in the sculptural installation and the images of younger men in the collage series. The artist reverses the relation of subordination of women’s image to men, consolidated by the traditional art historical narrative.
Presented in the smaller gallery hall are two video works from the series Dance as a Mapping Device (City 2015–2016 and Dance for Nelly and Maria 2016). The former features a tiny figure of a dancing woman, seen from a drone, who moves through the city streets. The whirling figure marks her territory and leaves traces, thus indicating the field of her freedom and joy, which bears no visual trace of violence and aggression that the culture of masculinity connotes. Yet, the recorded urban space has its history, it is situated at the intersection of private memory – the memory of traumatic stories of residents from city’s war history, carried by the artist throughout decades – and collective official memory, which is extremely sensitive and can become subject to political or ideological manipulation. The latter work shows a woman dancing in a private domestic space in heavy clogs worn by the prisoners of concentration camps. The work evokes the memory of the artist’s mother and grandmother, who were rescued from a transport to Auschwitz.
Dance, which throughout the years set new trends in culture as a manifestation of revolt and liberation, serves Janin as a tool that makes visible a universal truth about life, about the human being, about happiness and redefines the relation with the surrounding world, space and memory.
The exhibition Seven Fathers. Seven Dances poses questions about the liberty of the individual; the artist highlights the necessity to redefine basic concepts related to identity, relationships, family, authority and politics.
The exhibition forms part of a project carried out at the Labirynt Gallery in Lublin and at the BWA Gallery in Olsztyn in 2016. The show is accompanied by a monographic book devoted to Janin’s work.
Zuzanna Janin graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Co-founder of the lokal_30 gallery. One of the most recognised Polish artists both on the Polish and international scene. Her works belong to state and private collections in Poland and abroad.
Mariola Balińska
The exhibition is accompanied by a meeting with Zuzann Janin devoted to the presentation of her artistic work, titled From the End to the Beginning, held on the 17th of January 2017 at noon at the Faculty of Sculpture and Intermedia of the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk at the Small Armory Edifice in Plac Wałowy.
