Vergessenheit

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  Vergessenheit | 2015

The past is an arrangement of odd shards… that’s what it really is… So it is worth considering that despite everything we want it to be alive, filled with people and tangible… and that this need is so stubborn within us… Witold Gombrowicz - Dziennik (Journal) “So, where is the exhibition?” came the pressing question from one of the participants of the opening of Vergessenheit. It would make for an elegant anecdote, if it were not for the gaze of a spectator entering the exhibition hall – first inspecting the empty walls of the gallery before ultimately tracing upward toward the only exhibit on display. Said object was a deformed ship hull suspended under the ceiling and made from bitumix, whose application is Martyna Jastrzębska’s signature technique.(…) Many issues are intertwined in the Vergessenheit. Those connected with the problem of collective identification, but also on memory and forgetting that draw shaky boundaries of personal identity. By placing it in the current gallery space of a former shipyard building, Jastrzębska seems to be asking about the way in which the Shipyard functions in the consciousness of the inhabitants of Gdańsk. The demands of the Solidarity movement that was founded here led to not only democratic changes, but in the long run also to the fall of the shipyard itself, and its marginalisation in terms of the professional and social life of the city’s inhabitants. The artist thus draws the metaphor of a palimpsest to describe the way we think about a place and its history. Jastrzębska asks the question if the history of the city, continually overshadowed by newer versions and fresher layers, can make the shipyard - in some abstract future - achieve the rank of a solidified memorial statue, which will become an empty sign. It would then not as much keep the memory of shipyard events, but absolve us of the imperative to constantly rework and reinterpret their active memory. Would the shipyard then stop being a symbol of Gdańsk? Could it mutate from a focal point of Gdańsk identity to a slogan robbed of its meaning? It is not an accident that the title of the exhibition is the German word for ‘forgetting’, for the idea of the shipyard being forgotten, unrealistic at first glance, is not less unbelievable than suggesting eighty years ago that the city would lose its German character. The figure of the urban palimpsest enclosed in metaphorical frames displays a dual nature: over time older layers are fading, while also being retained. The Shipyard, like the German character of Gdańsk, will forever be etched in the history of the city, but the strategy to access those historical assets will be constantly changing. There is a scene in one of Stefan Chwin’s books, where a character peels wallpaper off a wall only to discover German newspapers stuck underneath. The metaphor of denying unwanted past is obvious here, and maybe the shipyard is condemned to such a random path of access. On the other hand, maybe it will not be accident, but archeological work of historians and the engagement of few passionate people that will ensure the shipyard’s survival in the outskirts of social awareness. Vergessenheit emerges as a study of disappearance and the unavoidable erasure of memory about the shipyard from the living tissue of Gdańsk identity. Going from identifying with it to the abstraction of a symbol that denotes nothing. The artist’s sculpture has a different character as well - a more individual one. Vergessenheit references the so called ‘original unmemory’ of the first years of life that do not register in the memory and are thus condemned to be forgotten. It is not without meaning that the aforementioned issues are brought up by an artist born in the year 1987 - two years before the fall of communism. An event which she of course cannot remember. Jastrzębska is a representative of a generation which can choose its own story of communism, though told through (pop-)culture clichés. This is the generation which has to choose between either the messianic narrative of martyrdom for their national story - the one that grows in strength each anniversary of the declaration of martial law; or the sentimental story digested by TV programmes - on the charms of floor-to-ceiling furniture and human relationships forged in long queues. Vergessenheit is also about that - placing the shipyard and its bygone era in personal stories.(…)” by Maksymilian Wroniszewski, 2015