THE GRAND MEMORY

Is a single memory truly singular?

Or perhaps it works like a system of refrains: repeating, looping, leading us astray, yet at times allowing us to step beyond its own cycle. (Górniak)

Can form become a tool for ordering inner chaos?

White, seemingly cool shapes create something akin to a memory chamber (Trusewicz). It’s an architecture built of ellipses and internal displacements.

What happens to experience once it is no longer present?

Iga Niewiadomska’s works operate at the threshold between durability and tangibility on the one hand, and that which resists direct apprehension on the other. The artist translates this tension into matter: into reliefs that seem to hold something, and into formal arrangements that oscillate between record and trace. Rather than reproducing images, her works create conditions for their continued existence.

How to grasp something that exists only in fragments?

Plaster reliefs and plywood objects employ a language of reduction. They organise weight, rhythm and internal relationships ‒ both within individual works and across the exhibition as a whole. This restrained visual system allows elements typically perceived as cool or distanced to function as carriers of affect and emotional charge. In this way, the exhibition spatialises anxiety and uncertainty, which ‒ like vultures suspended midair – hover above the structure of THE GRAND MEMORY.

Can something that keeps returning be contained?

Niewiadomska’s exhibition opens a space of uncertainty and poses a set of questions: can you disarm the intrusive images that destabilise the sense of the present? And can you tame them by enclosing them within form?

Selected literature:

1. Michał Trusewicz, Plemię (Tribe)
2. Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina
3. Ewelina Figarska, jestem małą muszką owocówką, przyleciałam na ciebie popatrzeć (I Am a Little Fruit Fly, I Flew Over Just to Look at You)
4. Mateusz Górniak, Pięć adaptacji (Five Adaptations)
5. Johanna Schopenhauer, Jugendleben und Wanderbilder (Youthful Life and Scenes from Travel)