{"id":16276,"date":"2022-07-15T18:32:02","date_gmt":"2022-07-15T16:32:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ggm.spinacz.com\/?p=16276"},"modified":"2024-07-23T09:06:20","modified_gmt":"2024-07-23T07:06:20","slug":"goshka-macuga-the-death-of-marxism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ggm.gda.pl\/en\/16276\/goshka-macuga-the-death-of-marxism\/","title":{"rendered":"Goshka Macuga THE DEATH OF MARXISM"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Dates:<\/strong> May 4, 2021 \u2013 June 27, 2021
Venue:<\/strong> Gdansk City Gallery 2, Powro\u017anicza 13\/15
Artist:<\/strong> Goshka Macuga
Curator:<\/strong> Patrycja Ry\u0142ko
Graphic identification:<\/strong> Micha\u0142 Pecko
<\/i>
Goshka Macuga\u2019s exhibition,\u00a0The Death of Marxism<\/i>, presents series of artworks that are\u00a0an effect of diverse forms of creative practice \u2013 artistic research, appropriations, and collages. It focuses on the theme of the kaleidoscopic complexity of historical and personal narratives of the past.

<\/p>

Macuga’s work\u00a0combines\u00a0antagonistic elements,\u00a0often\u00a0using the performative potential of\u00a0irony\u00a0that\u00a0subverts\u00a0both the authenticity of the document\u00a0and\u00a0customary\u00a0narratives.

<\/p>

The exhibition\u2019s title references one of the works\u00a0in her exhibition\u00a0that,\u00a0resounds particularly timely when shown at the Gda\u0144sk City Gallery in Gda\u0144sk.

<\/p>

The Death of Marxism\u00a0<\/i>is a tapestry that brings to mind the\u00a0grotesque\u00a0landscape-animal and Wawel Castle\u00a0arras\u00a0tapestries, a symbol of Sarmatian imperial ambitions, while\u00a0it further\u00a0alludes to the archives of Miroslav Tich\u00fd, an eccentric outsider artist who worked in the small town of Kyjov in Czechoslovakia. From the 1950s onwards, Tich\u00fd devoted his time to compulsively voyeuring women in his home town, taking surreptitious photographs of their daily, intimate moments. The hundreds of his photographs are an archive of an invisible presence of history, construed as a fabric woven\u00a0in patterns of significant places of a void that manifested itself through subconscious voyeuristic eroticism.

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In collages\u00a0using\u00a0Tichy’s photographs, Macuga skilfully oscillates between fact and fiction. \u00a0She successfully unseals the myth-making machine of\u00a0putting\u00a0history\u00a0in order, and as a result frees up\u00a0space\u00a0for a kind of laughter\u00a0at history. In her work, she places women from Tich\u00fd\u2019s photographs around Marx\u2019s tomb and replaces the inscription \u2018workers of all lands unite\u2019 with \u2018women of all lands unite\u2019,\u00a0highlighting the absence of women from historical narratives, a\u00a0frequently recurring theme\u00a0in Macuga\u2019s work. In this way, she also emphasizes solidarity\u00a0with\u00a0others\u00a0written out of collective, selective memory.

<\/p>

It was\u00a0precisely\u00a0this\u00a0mechanism of choice that allowed\u00a0humans\u00a0to control chaos and\u00a0<\/i>organize our reality \u2013 from prehistoric tribes to technological nomads. But a selectiveness that\u00a0violently\u00a0imposes a certain way of narrating history creates distortions. Such a revision, becomes\u00a0a map of the festering points in\u00a0\u00a0<\/i>historical\u00a0narratives, an its particular limitations, is presented by another\u00a0featured\u00a0work \u2018The Board\u2019. This is a chronicle of censorship, without a beginning or end, which shows, on-and-off, the mechanisms of suspending or amplifying history, pointing to living gaps\u00a0in\u00a0the timeline.

<\/p>

The Death of Marxism\u00a0<\/i>is also an exhibition that taps into\u00a0contemporary commentary\u00a0about the end of the world that is with\u00a0us\u00a0since the beginning of the global crisis caused by\u00a0the Covid-19 pandemic. An impending global catastrophe seems imminent, though we can hardly imagine it.

<\/p>

Marx predicted that\u00a0Communism\u00a0would be the final stage in the\u00a0development of the\u00a0historical process \u2013\u00a0and therefore\u00a0its triumphant culmination. In Gda\u0144sk, we have experienced both the beginning and end of this history, the rise of\u00a0Communist\u00a0power and its spectacular collapse. Here, the temporariness of great histories turns out to be inevitable, and the redistribution of power proceeds along a\u00a0multi-directional\u00a0course. Thanks to the heroic mobilization of a group of workers, including women workers, whose contribution to history is often neglected, oppressive\u00a0Communism, which was originally meant as a deliverance for the working class, was, after several decades in power overthrown by that very class. A new, post-Cold War world order was a direct consequence, and liberty was again forced into old-new tracks of utopian hopes for a better tomorrow and replaced with fledgling democracy and techno-scientific capitalism. Thirty years later, Poland still experiences a post-communist \u2018jetlag\u2019, with the past mistaken in turns\u00a0as nostalgia and painful trauma, and the future being nothing but an illusory set of projections \u2013 great, bombastic expectations.

<\/p>

The featured works by Goshka Macuga are based on this seductive symmetry of oppositions. They highlight the mechanisms of creating\u00a0historical\u00a0<\/i>narratives, about\u00a0their concentric circles, cycles, and\u00a0inevitable\u00a0repetitions, allowing us to get closer to the intertextures of the post-socialist tapestry of the present.

__________
GOSHKA MACUGA
Born in Warsaw, Poland in 1967, Goshka Macuga has lived and worked in London since 1989. Macuga is an interdisciplinary artist working across media including sculpture, installation, photography and video. Her practice connects different areas and methods of research. Her inquiries are often focused on institutional histories proposing unconventional associative readings of their social and political histories. Macuga\u2019s strategic orchestration of existing materials, collectables and archival documents support the reframing of established narratives. In 2019, she conceived Exhibition M, a large-scale commission for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She has had solo exhibitions at the New Museum, New York; Fondazione Prada, Milan; Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin; Neues Museum, Nuremberg; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Zach\u0119ta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Tate Britain, London; Kunsthalle Basel; and the Walker Arts Centre, Minneapolis. She was included in Documenta 13 in 2012, and nominated for the Turner Prize in 2008. Her work is included in numerous public collections including Tate, MoMA, Government Art Collection, Arts Council Collection, MCA Chicago, Walker Art Center, Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, and Castello di Rivoli.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Dates: May 4, 2021 \u2013 June 27, 2021Venue: Gdansk City Gallery 2, Powro\u017anicza 13\/15Artist: Goshka MacugaCurator: Patrycja Ry\u0142koGraphic identification: Micha\u0142 PeckoGoshka Macuga\u2019s exhibition,\u00a0The Death of Marxism, presents series of artworks that are\u00a0an effect of diverse forms of creative practice \u2013 artistic research, appropriations, and collages….<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10251,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_wp_rev_ctl_limit":""},"categories":[108],"tags":[97],"class_list":["post-16276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ggm2-en","tag-single-photo"],"acf":{"data_rozpoczecia":"20210504","data_zakonczenia":"20210627","miejsce":"GGM2"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ggm.gda.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ggm.gda.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ggm.gda.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ggm.gda.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ggm.gda.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16276"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/ggm.gda.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16276\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26581,"href":"https:\/\/ggm.gda.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16276\/revisions\/26581"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ggm.gda.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ggm.gda.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ggm.gda.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ggm.gda.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}