ZUZANNA JANIN, KUNSTHALLE WIEN, opening 17.08.2010 at 6 p.m.
ZUZANNA JANIN
Majka from the Movie
(in collaboration with TOMASZ KOZAK - trailer)
solo show
at
KUNSTAHALLE WIEN
project space Karlsplatz
Treitlstraße 2, A-1040 Vienna
www.kunsthallewien.at
17 August – 1 September 2010
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IDENTIFYING IDENTITY
(A Troubling Reality)
fragments of the text by Mark Gisbourne from the catalogue, published by lokal_30 / Foundation Lokal Sztuki and City Gallery, Arsenal, Poznań, with a support of Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of Poland and Gefördert aus Mitteln der Stiftung für deutsch-polnische Zusammenarbeit
The composite nature of a modern Western identity poses a state of confusion, and at the same time there remains a residual sense of a delusional belief in self-made identity. The fragmented confection that we call ‘our personal’ identity, is greatly dependent upon the myriad of contextual circumstances that act as an interface to the accumulative aspects of the varied lives we live. Whether these contextual phenomena are experienced as mere objects, people or things, they are the Other (and ‘other’), and form the complex background met in a groundswell of discursive attitudes and circumstances (the mirrored interior or exterior representational reality). It is their specific characteristics that makes the actual formation of a separate individual identity possible.[i] We are it seems only that and no more than that which others make us, thereby and in consequence live a condition of existent reality made in relation to those differing other(s) that are in some part alienated as the ‘not us’.[ii] This contemporary view is by now far removed from the ’subjective ‘I” of the Cartesian cogito ergo sum; the belief in a purely insular subjectivity of ’self proof’, or of a self-generated identity that has long ago slipped away.[iii] We are made in the world, by the world, and for the world. But in the forming of an inter-subjective self-conscious sense of identity, its formation is necessarily constituted by the multiplicities of extraneous consciousness. They act as background to the unbridgeable reality of the unsaying and the unsaid. There is always a gap between what is said or expressed as content, and the act of saying or expressing it. The reader as a result becomes uniquely the text of their own world, and this can only be the basis for the forming of an identity.
The relevance of these simple observations comes immediately to the fore when considering the art work of Zuzanna Janin, whose film and video practice, alongside her installations and three dimensional objects, frequently addresses ideas of social construction and formation of interactive singular and/or group identities. More specifically how both singular and collective identities are manipulated and played off against one another in today’s contemporary culture. A singular identity thus finds itself – as Janin makes us aware – in a continuous state of personal construction and displacement. in relation to the Other as experienced. This is the necessary condition of the projections born of our conscious and unconscious daily self-making. How we form and shape and thereafter transmit the nature of our personal identity through social and cultural interaction, whether by specifically conscious intentions or otherwise, is crucial to an understanding the artist Janin’s work. The shaping of identity is made in time and by circumstances, and it is not something that is a pre-given. This is most evident in her recent and ongoing major video serial project Majka from the Movie (2009), which is yet to be finally completed.
The five part video serial Majka from the Movie takes as its point of departure and as a framing narrative a television soap opera of sorts, called the Madness of Majka Skowron / Szaleństwo Majki Skowron (1975), a popular series made in Poland in the mid-seventies and still shown. (also shown in these time in DDR under the title Das Mädchen Majka – z.j.). The original series story was based on a generational conflict between a father and adolescent daughter, as a result of which the latter (the artist as a young actress – Zuzanna Antoszkiewicz) runs away from home and spends the summer on an island, where she is assisted by a young man. The archetype of the lost heroine (Miranda) and the young man (a would be Ferdinand) draws loosely on the Shakespeare play The Tempest. The second Majka (2009) with filmed elements directed and intercut by the artist (and in fact the daughter of Janin) is both a simile of the first character, and an extended metaphor of Janin as filmmaker. By using her daughter as both an extension and part of her own personal identity formation, the artist presents herself both in front of an behind the camera. Indeed, throughout the five parts of the video serialisation the periodic intercutting or splicing in of Majka, and also her contemporary re-incarnation or life projection, operate as the shared unity against a backdrop or compendium of personal film and music appropriations that encompasses the metonymic (a contiguity of association between two ideas), metaphor (notions of comparative similarity) and continuous similes (shared aspects or common features). (…)
Mark Gisbourne, Berlin, January 2010
ENG__more of the text by MARK GISBOURNE
PL___rozmowa KAMILI WIELEBSKIEJ z ZJ
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