MEETINGS: Performance by Weronika Pelczyńska as part of Aneta Grzeszykowska's exhibition "Daughter"

Two people, dressed alike, attempt to create a single dance before an audience. One begins, while the other repeats her movement. With each successive repetition, however, the boundary between original and copy begins to blur. Movement passes from one body to the other, and with it agency—and the question of who is leading and who is following. 

The performance grows out of themes explored in the exhibition Daughter: similarity and difference, copying and repetition, and a relationship in which we come to recognise ourselves through another person. It touches on the particular intimacy of the relationship between child and parent, but also on the experience of women whose identities are shaped in relation to other women.

The two performers continually repeat, take on and transform each other’s gestures in an attempt to create a shared choreography. The closer their bodies come to one another, the more clearly their differences emerge. The attempt to create a single body becomes a question about the possibility of being together without losing one’s individuality—and about whether, in a close relationship, we can recognise ourselves or whether we might also disappear within it.

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Series of events accompanying Warsaw Gallery Weekend MEETINGS, co-financed by the City of Warsaw and the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage with the support of the Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts.