Simulacra
A nugget in the midst of the expansive, heterogeneous unpacking of the Venice Biennale 2022 exhibition, “The Milk of Goals,” the photographic collection Mama, created in 2018 by the Polish artist Aneta Grzeszykowska, is as disturbing as it is upsetting. Reactivating the subversive themes pricey to the Surrealists by way of the fetishized determine of the mannequin and the puppet, the photographer (born in 1974 in Warsaw) levels her daughter enjoying dolls with the silicone duplicate of her personal truncated physique (decreased to a bust). Broken down into tender and bucolic scenes, the macabre recreation, declined with a delicate duplicity in colour and in black and white, takes a morbid and disturbing turn when the fetish physique not provides the phantasm (by means of the framing of the bust or the subterfuges of the mise en scène) and seems as it is: a bit of inanimate physique – positioned here, on a bed, right up towards the body of the kid mendacity down, there, in a cart pulled by the woman on the water’s edge, or abandoned in a deck chair. We understand then that it's with demise that the little woman performs, after having floated the simulacrum, with its giant, open eyes, at her aspect within the murky waters of the lake, and eventually burying it in the earth. From doll to corpse, there is only one step…
Oscillating between dream and nightmare, sweetness and cruelty, on the sting of surrealist phantasmagoria and horror film, Aneta Grzeszykowska’s images-fictions play with ambivalence (animate/inanimate, presence/absence) and the inversion of roles (mother/baby, topic/object) in an insidious approach that creates uneasiness within the spectator, and thus provokes a mirrored image on id, but in addition on cruelty and perversion, submission and disappearance.
Truncated bodies, fetishes and puppets… that look like alive; bodies in pieces sculpted (from prostheses and animal skins) and photographed (Selfie, 2014); dismembered or dissolved bodies, “absorbed” by darkness, in choreographed fictions (Black, 2007; Headache, 2008)… For the artist, who has been creating work on fragmentation, erasure, and decomposition since her beginnings, the work have to be cathartic: by displaying dying, it must help us to tame it…
“The Milk of Goals” – Venice Biennale&
Central pavilion – Giardini
Calle Dietro Il Paludo, 849, Venice, Italy
Until November 27
Films to observe on www.artmuseum.pl&
Stéphanie Dulout
L’article ANETA GRZESZYKOWSKA est apparu en premier sur Galerie Joseph.
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