Salwa

Despite the references to the past in the works of Alicja Karska and Aleksandra Went, history loses its transparency. In the film entitled Salwa [The Volley] (2021), the place of a rather unobvious media staging is the ballroom of the Palace in Jedlinka. It is impossible to encompass the entire room with its symmetry of divisions at one glance. A montage with a play of changing perspectives, close-ups and points of view creates a compositional focalisation effect and what we see seems to oscillate between truth and fiction, reality and illusion. Flare-ups of coloured light bring out fragments of neo-classical sculptures, ornate stucco, and paintings from the darkness. The dormant decorum potential of the ballroom comes to life almost according to a Freudian reveal scenario. In the shrouded in darkness interior, there are no windows visible through which colourful reflections of light from fireworks supposedly fall in. Their successive flare-ups are accompanied by the intensifying sounds of fireworks. Both are the result of cinematic simulation. The decorations, illuminated for a moment, are quickly lost in the gloom, only to beguile the gaze with their different rendition a while later. The ballroom scenery has its own actors, the classicist sculptures take on unexpected expression, characterised by light, seen in different shots, from the side, from below, in close-ups of a frozen frame, set in motion by the camera circling them. The spectacle of sculptures emerging from the shadows and disappearing, and the sounds of fireworks coming from outside, creates a cinematic illusion of space in which fears and fantasies are  revealed and acted out. In Karska and Went, the cinematic illusion mixes the real with the imagined, the titular volleys of illumination trigger a strange choreography of motionless, mutilated sculptures, something that escapes everyday and, above all, daytime perception. Emerging from the darkness disturbing phenomenality of what we are looking at, which is and is not at the same time, can be related to an absent past, returning to, or rather haunting the present. 

Before we go to the lower hall with the film screening, we enter the exhibition space filled with several dozen mirrors, or rather an installation composed of old mirrors. Despite its title: Drawings, instead of drawing, the artists scratched the paint covering the backs of the mirrors. As a result, instead of reflections, we see traces of the destruction of mirror mimesis in them. In their own way, the artists erase what could be seen in these mirrors, at the same time inscribing other narratives into them. They thwart the self-reflective tendencies to gaze inward and succumb to narcissistic illusions. However, what can be seen on the other side of the mirror, materialised in drawings, does not necessarily have to be an illusion.