ARTIST PROFILE

Justyna Wencel

  • Poland (b. 1977)
  • Currently in Warsaw, Poland.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I am interested in the questions of identity, magical rituals in art, human relationship, personal and public memory. For several years, I explore home as an archive and deal with social roles of woman.
I work with installation, objects, performance, video art and public art. Together with Marcin Chomicki I am part of the artistic collective REPLACERS within which I focus on forgotten places to be transformed into live public space, interactive and accessible to people.


BIOGRAPHY

Visual artist working with video art, installation, objects and public art. Graduate of the Faculty of Painting, Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and the Institute of English Studies, Warsaw University. Awarded the scholarship of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (2006, 2009 and 2014), and the scholarship of the Podlaskie Voivodship (2011). Received her Phd in 2012, at the Faculty of New Media and Scenography, Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.


Author and co-author of many public art projects devoted to the 'architecture of transformation', public memory, site-specific city area mapping projects. The latest realizations: 0.5 km of colour, Warsaw (2015), Immersion, Gdańsk (2014), Architecture of transformation, Warsaw (2013), Skarpa! Reactivation POWER CULTURE ENTERTAINMENT, Warsaw (2011).




BIBLIOGRAPHY

  • On Justyna Wencel's exhibition "Earth, Earth"

    Justyna Wencel has called her exhibition at the Zachęta Project Room Earth, Earth. This is also the title of her most recent work, a three-channel video installation. Screened on the gallery’s underground level, in a space conducive to attentive reception, the film was made in 2014 and documents an artistic action begun a year earlier. Called Green Jazdów, its purpose was to bring to public attention a doomed idyllic enclave of verdure and wooden houses in downtown Warsaw. The artist had been given access to a small garden, and what she did there (‘laboratory of spatial forms’) is documented in the video. Laboriously pressing earth through a sieve; using it to fill concrete pots arranged in a labyrinthine order and then raking its surface into regular patterns; finally, attempting to negotiate the labyrinth by walking barefoot along the edges of the pots. Time was an important element of the recorded actions, semi-meditative as they were — the idea was to record a process of transformation, a striving for perfect form, which was ultimately defeated, however, by the unpredictable elements. It turned out that the earth in the pots had been sieved so thoroughly that almost nothing had sprouted in them, whereas the pots themselves had been overgrown with rank weeds. Wencel was accompanied by her life partner Marcin Chomicki; their daughter is also to be seen in some of the scenes. Recapitulating themes present in Justyna Wencel’s works from recent years, Earth, Earth is also a manifestation of her existential and artistic maturity and a point of departure for new projects.

    The opposition between our natural inclinations, our relationship with nature or precisely (the) earth, and the rules imposed by society; art as a magical practice able to affect the surrounding world and the artist herself, and able to enchant reality — these have been some of the key themes of Wencel’s practice, and they are also present in her latest video installation. Public-space work, involved in the local historical and social context, and a preoccupation with small-scale urban architecture (including monuments) have marked her path from the very beginning, notably in projects with Chomicki.

    The artist is also showing four of her earlier works, dealing with themes such as our relationship with nature, time, transience and rebirth, family ties, or gender. Their protagonist (Wencel herself) is shown performing what looks like meditations or rites of passage, a cross between folklore and magic. The Map (2009) and the videos: Tree (2010), Hell Heaven (2010) and Hereditary Traits (2012) were conceived in the artist’s family home and garden (at a particularly difficult time in her life) using various objects associated with her family members, including departed or departing ones. The former two films document performances centred around a ‘magical tree’, performances, as the artist tells us, inspired by rituals of sympathetic magic, well rooted in many cultures of the world. For Wencel, earth is something that gives birth and buries.


    Map is a series of photographs documenting an artistic action in the vein of land art. A labyrinthine composition, comprised of rectangular pots built with canvas stretchers upholstered with textiles found in the artist’s five previous homes, is installed in the garden. The elements cause the impermanent objects to gradually decay and disintegrate, and they literally merge back with nature, returning to mother earth. The clothes or bed sheets that had been used in their making once touched the bodies of people who may have departed too. Presented in the form of a projection, the photographs document this process.

    Set in a similar, personal history-encumbered scenery, using local ‘props’, Hereditary Traits documents, music video-style, the artist’s performances, her discourse with the entrenched notions of femininity and roles traditionally ascribed to women. It is a kind of treatise on the uneasiness of the mother-daughter relationship (underscored by the lyrics of PJ Harvey’s Pocket Knife, playing in the background), on finding one’s own path, and on creating a new order by destroying the old one.

    The exhibition is accompanied by an environment consisting of objects specially created for the occasion using technical components, modified parts of machines usually associated with the masculine world. (In 2012, Wencel had created a series of objects alluding to the traditional notions of the feminine world, titled Place Called Home). The objects resemble exhibits from an archaeology museum, votive figures or fertility idols, sometimes bringing to mind abstract or minimalist sculptures. The artist so writes about them: ‘The new forms are not objects in the purely aesthetic sense; rather they are waste products of a process of extraction and combination. In a search for the energy of objects and a form containing both elements — masculine and feminine.’

    What the viewer of Earth, Earth will notice in Justyna Wencel’s new projects is, above all, a consistent search for a state of natural balance and a striving to remain true to oneself.

    Magda Kardasz
    curator