My name is Katarzyna Łyszkowska, I am a Polish interdisciplinary artist from the Department of Drawing at the Faculty of Media Art and Visual Education at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. My art emphasises the values of creating sustainable, participatory art that influences the quality of personal and social life. The trigger for my artistic reflections is personal experience, which I try to analyse in a broader, global context, universalising it as a platform for collective experience.
Today, as never before, reality generates new challenges. Especially now, in a world dominated by all-embracing capitalism, the irreversible effects of natural resource exploitation and global warming, our well-being is suffering from depression, affected by wars, conflicts and the recent pandemic. The world is torn between two Realities: the Real one and the Virtual, with younger and younger people more and more often hiding from the real problems generated by the former. The objectives that art set for itself half a millennium ago were tailored to the social, didactic and aesthetic needs of the time. One hundred years ago, art moved from realism to the realm of the imagination. The industrial age developed many fields of human activity at an accelerated speed and art always followed suit. At the end of the last century, art entered the age of the personal computer, opening a window of virtual technologies. The time of the glamour of digital technology, the Internet, 2d and 3d graphics, Virtual Reality or holograms, has unavoidably led to the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI), including image generators, raising debatable issues and ambivalent attitudes. In conclusion, Art is a mirror of the continually transforming world.
As a finalist in the Outdoor section, I will address the aforementioned thread, which resonates strongly with this year's Biennale’s theme. The work Datamorphosis, which I am going to create during my month-long residency, addresses the question of where our attention is today. Does entanglement in the cocoon of virtual reality and social media limit and isolate our functioning in the real world? Or, on the contrary: does it open us up to a new form of existence that gives access to all data? The cocoon of change of the artificial intelligence era is transforming us into new hybrid beings that are part of a single networked entity with access to all databases. Sadly, it is at the expense of traditional human ties.
In the other two projects invited to the Indoor section, I set out to ask the fundamental questions on happiness. Can it be found, or perhaps bought or won? The participatory guilding the Calf made up of lottery tickets becomes the pretext to answering these questions. During that activity, I document chats with participants who, by circling their lucky numbers, share their insights on their personal ways to happiness. The second object named Fiscal Mandala was made within the Art For Advent project (Murze Magazine,2019, Issue 6). The realisation involved documenting each of the 26 days of work during Advent. I meticulously arranged the Buddhist Mandala of Compassion from origami modules made of receipts collected during pre-Christmas shopping. The exasperating proces of folding and arranging countless receipts in the time before Christmas triggered off my spontaneous reaction resulting in the destruction of the piece, which I documented with an amateur phone recording. It was my response to being lost in today's consumption. I present the reconstructed mandala on display along with a video of just over a minute. Interestingly, after placing the work in the case, the receipts began to fade - the mandala has initiated a process of self-purification. Conscious consumption should become a daily practice that protects the environment and therefore ourselves, something we often forget while functioning more in a virtual, ephemeral idea than in the Real.
Meanwhile, it is the paper that gives me, in the Real, the opportunity to materialise these ephemeral ideas, such as in the case of my series with the perverse title, ‘What can I afford...’. It is my first major installation using the potential of paper, and it is meant to achieve the illusiveness and mock-up nature of luxury goods. It was there that I began the whole adventure of redefining the utilitarian character of paper, giving it the role of a carrier of substantial meanings, important in the process of interpretation. The goal of the work was not to copy, but to create a parallel reality. Presenting these mock-ups, like an insignia of power, was to give the exhibit a comical absurdity. The biggest technological challenge was the creation of a large-scale racing model of the Porsche GT3 RS. The car was shown in many presentations, addressing the theme of consumption and desire still further.
Out of my works of paper, one is particularly important to me. The House of Cards series, begun in 2010, is an autobiographical, interactive installation that refers to the subsequent decades of my life. The four objects created so far represent my childhood, adolescence, adulthood and maturity. They have an opening at the bottom, allowing to peek inside into my story summarising each decade of my life. The viewers are an indispensable element of the installations, generating the situation of reception and co-creating the work. By placing the objects on their shoulders, they literally become an artistic hybrid observed from the outside. The houses are symbolic images of my personal memories, generated at different stages of experiencing social space as a metaphorical diary of my life. It gives me an incredible power to create, letting me become strongly aware of the transience and importance of the existence in the ‘Here and Now’. Now I know that one day these houses will be what is left after me, may there be at last 10 of them.
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