Ear Piece
Ksenia Gryckiewicz, Antonina Nowacka

28.09-28.10.2023

exhibition is a part of Warsaw Gallery Weekend 2023

Warsaw Gallery Weekend

28.09 – 1.10.2023

13th edition of Warsaw Gallery Weekend is coming up – establishing its position as the biggest contemporary art preview in East-Central Europe. During this year’s programme, you’ll get to see the exhibitions of 35 galleries from Warsaw, Poznan, Gliwice and Cracow. As well as – artist talks, discussion panels, guided art walks and many more.

WGW | Facebook event

The exhibition by painter Ksenia Gryckiewicz and composer Antonina Nowacka is an empirical journey into the depths of the inner self, an attempt to find balance within oneself and in nature, a pursuit of delving as deeply as possible. The search of self sometimes revolves in circles, at times excessively rooted in surface consciousness, and at times sinking into a hypnotic state of reality assessment impossibility, generating images, invoking experiences, and memories absent upon awakening. 

Gryckiewicz multiplies her image, changing perspectives like successive frames of a film, delving deeper from objective to subjective. Intuitively, she seeks duality, support in another person, and a connection with them, trying to constitute herself from the polyphony in introspection. The characters in the paintings seem to be trying to retreat to the Lacanian stade du miroir in order to start seeing themselves as a separate person anew through self-identification with their image. Inner dialogue sometimes leads to self-understanding, while other times it evokes a feeling of falling, as if transitioning from wakefulness to dreaming. Euphoria clashes with the destructive impossibility of making a choice. 

In her practice, Nowacka realizes sound compositions using natural spaces with unusual auditory potential, including caves, grottoes, and open meadows. She uses the voice as an instrument and its correlation with mental states, internal and external phenomena. Nature actively participates in the artist’s actions, becoming a context or pretext for her work, sometimes even one of the characters. The composer translates her methodology from the realm of music into visual activities, venturing into another medium – photography – to portray flowers by abstracting and delving into their forms. In the relationship between the observer and the object of observation, she observes and reviews nature as a sphere of surreal narratives and unknown, fantastic worlds. She composes through the delicacy and transience of colorful forms.

The artists together created a music piece that is present in the exhibition space. The recording, made in the Rotunda of the Królikarnia building, is a kind of dialogue between the artists, an exchange of energy. They bring out the ritualistic nature of singing from the deepest areas for themselves, entering a state of trance in search of the most inaccessible points both in their nature, but also going far beyond it at times, together they shape the landscape of their worlds.

It remains to bow to the earth, listen, surrender to the resonating nature, and in peace, wait for oneself. To experience a state of equilibrium – to hear one’s own voice.