Walking through the chambers of the imaginary Memory Palace is a mnemonic known since antiquity. Each object encountered evokes specific memories. Crossing its threshold, one discovers not only images of the past, but also the complex emotions that shape identity — ambivalence, where beauty meets decay and shame intertwines with fascination.

​

In the course of growing up, we face boundaries and ambiguities. We place, separate and define our place. This experience can lead to fear and disgust, but also sublimation — the transformation of chaos into art or mystical experiences. A common thread in the practice of Guenther, Sakowska, Szczerbowska and Wojcik is tension — between aesthetics and control, between structure and subjectivity, between beauty and its decay. The artists do not create clear-cut diagnoses. Rather, they test boundaries, decompose mechanisms. They trace what remains hidden. Their works build maps of contemporary emotions: shame, need, loneliness, anger and the desire for control — but also the desire for freedom.​

​

Abject — a psychoanalytic term introduced by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror (1982) — is all about ambiguity. It separates from that which threatens, but does not protect from it completely. On the contrary, it recognizes the threat as something eternally present. It is a mixture of judgment and emotion, condemnation and longing. It is inscribed in the duality of the experience of socialization into the female role, planted on guilt and the constant shifting of boundaries between norm and taboo. It unseals them, exposes the repressed, the unwanted, the hidden. Pink is easily soiled.​

​

Artists face the abject in two ways — they highlight ugliness, fear, anxiety or construct aesthetic armor. They encase, subdue, tame. They organize the narrative fabric of identity with symbols, scores, architectural circuits, dream map journeys. Nevertheless, the peace is disturbed, the sleeper is entangled in dreams by smoke from phallic candles, the clustered marks on the scores swell. Eroticism becomes entangled with violence and the subconscious realm. And beauty, fragile and delicate, can crumble any moment. Although the Palace is built from memories, it is first and foremost a map of emotions and a trace of what has passed but never disappeared. The objects activate memory that is not logical, but sensory, related to texture, muscle tension, the smell of smoke, traces on the skin. The artists do not reconstruct the past, but perform it, as a ritual of growing up, a spectacle of sublimation.​

​

The detailed character of the works presented in the exhibition is not accidental. It is the detail that sets the rhythm of looking and introduces the world of the hidden, whether in filigree drawings or large-format paintings. Exploring, the viewer becomes a voyeur who discovers more elements. Intimate proximity activates the unconscious. It is necessary to evoke feelings of revulsion, to activate defense mechanisms, to confront one's inner self. 

​​​
Weronika Guenther looks at a slice of reality dominated by beauty and the desire for beauty, love and the desire for love. Important motifs in her works are the belongingness provided by consumption or the loneliness resulting from feelings of lack. However, she is not concerned with criticism. In the context of consumption, she is much more interested in learning about the emotional mechanisms behind the desire than in judging them. In her eyes, beauty is full of anxiety and very fragile.​

Art, the artist says, will not change the world. At most, it can describe it. This description is done semi-consciously, as it requires working with visual language and rearranging imaginary worlds. Oneiric beauty is a way of escaping from all that is difficult. Beauty provides respite, as does the world of consumption depicted by the artist. The folders, maintained in scrapbooking aesthetics, are oneiric diaries of imagined journeys to metropolises — full of culture, fashion, love and consumption.

In Maryna Sakowska's drawings, surreal constructions reminiscent of playgrounds, school gymnasiums and sets inspired by everyday life and BDSM practices form the backdrop for the events unfolding. Recurring motifs, such as scratching posts, ladders and furniture, create a visual language that balances between the rituals of discipline and the everydayness of the body, which is at once domesticated and wild, subject to control but ready to break out of the framework. Scapegoat alludes to Girard's mimetic theory, where choosing the culprit of tensions preserves order by diverting attention from real problems.​

​

In The Dead Class, puppets and marionettes refer to determinism — according to which humans are guided by biology, upbringing and environment, which raises questions about free will and autonomy. It is also hinted at by a quote from Boudelaire's Flowers of Evil inscribed on one of the panels, The Devil holds the puppet threads! The title of the work alludes to Kantor's performance, in which the classroom becomes a place of return, a haunting of the past. Similarly, the mannequins, acting as relics of memory.​

​

The Peeplock series illustrates the tension between visibility and secrecy, fetishism and control. It oscillates between the ritual of taming the body and the attempt to liberate it, creating a multi-dimensional narrative about embodiment, power and autonomy. The zoomorphisation shifts meanings — the characters balance between femininity and androgyny, animality and anthropomorphism. They become a figure of both domestication and training, strength, instinct and physical resistance. As in BDSM practices, the characters simultaneously submit and control, revealing the complexity of the relationship between subordination and self-determination.

Julia Szczerbowska's paintings are an intimate tale of corporeality marked by experience — nudity balancing between trauma and the act of reconciliation, between exposure to the gaze and the desire for cover. Shrouds, soft and protective cover, but not completely; they filter the image, like incense smoke. Here it becomes a sign of purification, prayer and transcendence: it rises upward, blurs the sharpness of perception to reveal another dimension of corporeality — unearthly, sacred, intuitive. In turn, smoke from candles of phallic shapes creeps into the dreams of the sleeping figure, disturbing rest, carrying tension and anxiety.​

Thistles, organizing the composition of the diptych, act as a liminal sign. It is a symbol of the ambivalence of carnality — simultaneously attracting and hurting. In many cultures (including Celtic, Christian, Mediterranean), the thistle was a sign of punishment, humility and suffering, but also a protective force, warding off evil. The pea, a counterweight to the thistle, becomes a metaphor for the taming of nakedness: a lightness that brings corporeality out of trauma, restores its softness, freshness. Yet here too, the tension is present — the body, shown piecemeal, taken out of context, can easily become an object of gaze. Where the pea softens the bodily presence, the thistle reminds of its danger.

​​

In Szczerbowska's works, matter and symbolism intermingle seamlessly: corporeality here is both weight and light, object and spiritual space. This is an attempt to capture the body as an archive of experience — intimate, sacred, hybridized.​

​

In Inga Wojcik's work, phantasms are intertwined with impatience, even obsessiveness — tensions that accompany the process of forming and performing identity. It is not given once and for all, but established in constant movement, as a space for staging strategies. The artist explores the possibility of transforming herself, returning to herself in an altered form, in the act of repetition and imitation. It's an intensely emotional process, marked by inner tension and a sense of the impossibility of peace — which permeates both the mood and the structure of the stories told.

​​

Wojcik operates with a dreamy, nostalgic and hazy aesthetic, achieving it by juxtaposing various visual elements with music. For her, scores become a tool for organizing reality — they introduce new narratives that tame the excess of forms and emotions, including abject associations and feelings. The artist's creative process is not linear — it is rather a dialogue with herself, in which the artist constantly challenges herself with new things. Instead of conforming to a pre-planned work, she follows processuality. The paintings, when created, become objects that are often overloaded with form, almost overwhelming. And the artist can change them, save them, or let them pass away.

​​

Curator: Marianna Lomza

 

The authors of the track accompanying the Polyphony piece by Inga Wojcik are Pawel Stachowiak (wujaHZG) and Mateusz Wardynski (asthma).

​