MEETINGS: "The Shortest Distance". A six-hour durational performance by Gizela Mickiewicz

For her solo exhibition, Gizela Mickiewicz is creating a series of sculptures cast in wax, which will be used during a special day-long performative event. The event is conceived as taking place within the sculptural material itself: as time passes, the sculptures will burn like candles, gradually diminishing and disappearing before the participants’ eyes.
The beginning of the event will be the only opportunity to see the sculptures in their complete form. Afterwards, visitors will be able to observe their gradual disappearance and follow the changes occurring in their shapes.
The exhibition title, The Shortest Distance, describes closeness in terms of distance—as a process of continually reducing it while remaining aware that it never disappears entirely. The title also resonates with the process through which the works are created. Impressions of places and parts of the body, which make up the forms of the sculptures presented in the exhibition, are produced through direct contact: they come as close as possible to particular places, people, and situations. This process also reflects a need to draw closer to events and memories, as well as an attempt to render them with the greatest possible precision.
The performative sculptures go one step further. They are not merely records of fragments of reality captured in material but create a space in which the present can unfold within matter itself. They seek to make both the passage of time and the duration of a moment perceptible.

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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.