Farewell

• 

  5 / 6

  Farewell | 2014 - 2016

Installation Pożegnanie / Farewell is an immersion in the deconstruction of identity, which is for Martyna Jastrzębska one of the key problems that reworks in her installations. “(…) Five objects modelled out of bitumix make up the installation. They follow us from the past, but lose the sharpness of their meaning, becoming impossible to accurately identify - each of them creates its own network of associations and potential memorial narratives. Jastrzębska’s sculptures are like memory debris - phantoms of multiple meanings that you can look at through the two great forms of memory of the last century: nostalgia and trauma. The open book can be both a youth’s secret-keeper or a forbidden work like “Mein Kampf”. The crossed crutches could symbolise disability or thankful appreciation. However, Pożegnanie eludes both the nostalgic and the traumatic. (…) Forgetting thus becomes the basis for identity: the more what is lost is shrouded in memory, the more particular a tale it demands. As time goes by, the nostalgic myth of the past intertwines distant events and severed stories, connects anecdotes and fragments of strangers’ memories, creating a tale which carries the identity of the nostalgiac. The model of nostalgic existence is therefore narration, while Jastrzębska presents the memory scraps as severance, discontinuity and fragment. It would seem that such a perspective could lead towards a traumatic experience of the work. You could assume that the black sculptures of Jastrzebska are an artistic vision of a traumatic memory: denied and concealed in the chasm of unmemory - a memory whose occasional glimpses reach the subject’s consciousness and thus disturb their sense of security by eliciting the dread of facing something that has been rejected. This impression can be further strengthened because Pożegnanie was inspired by the prose of Ernest Hemingway, and it was made in the year 2014 - one hundred years after the onset of World War I. However, this interpretational clue seems only partially helpful in experiencing the sculptures of the artist. For trauma, despite narrative cracks and gaps that are characteristic of it, is a state of decay of what used to be constant and stable. A traumatic memory is the ruin of narration. Jastrzębska models the shards of memories, which, emerging from the depths of forgetting, only “wait” for a tale about themselves. Both nostalgia and trauma remain in a close connection with the narrative. The former constantly adds colour, musing more stories and made-up anecdotes. It builds the subject’s identity. The latter is a post-disaster state, the radiation of an Event which prevents one from building a tale again. Pożegnanie belongs, however, to an opposite memorial order. It “takes place” in the domain of potentiality and can evoke both nostalgic imagination and traumatic glimpses. Jastrzębska’s sculptures forward you to the pre-discursive pattern, they are a raw material, a memorial prefabricate, which only then calls for processing and enclosure in a narrative frame. There is (barely a minute long) found footage movie implemented in Pożegnanie. It is comprised of stills from war movies that depict silent, saddened characters staring at some point that is not visible to the viewer of the piece. In the recording you can see Hollywood movie stars. The confrontation of mysterious sculptures with a video narrative that imposes a clear interpretation leads to the key feeling of Jastrzębska’s piece. The artist is interested, it seems, in the moment when the scattered fragments of memories begin to form a story, especially, what is influence on the shape of that story by phantasms stuck in consciousness, imaginary clichés and iconic representations imprinted onto memory. (…) Pożegnanie emerges in this perspective as an artistic study of the distortion of memory of a twofold kind. The first is the fragmentation and incompleteness of memory, and the second - the danger and urge to place them within a known narrative format that would serve as the basis for identification. The artist keeps the viewer suspended. She shows the moment of moving from scattered memory debris to what has passed: making the viewer aware of the impossibility to reach the past in its pure form that has not been infected by the amassing of imaginary clichés. By presenting a peculiar relationship of memory and imagination, Jastrzębska points to the uncertainty that is inexorably linked with memory - a quality that, for fear of disintegration of our identity, we try to hide even from ourselves.” by Maksymilian Wroniszewski; 2015