Music/film/photography/performance. Expressions of Feminism to commemorate Natalia LL

Friday, September 2 from 6-8 PM ET

A.I.R. Gallery
155 Plymouth Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201

As part of Sleepless in Warsaw, A.I.R. Gallery presents a 30-min. concert/durational sound environment Metamorphosis/Dafne (2021) by New York based Polish artist Monika Weiss followed by a talk with Izabella Gustowska about Women’s Art one of the first feminist exhibitions in Poland and her film Relative Features of Resemblance, (1979-1980). As well, this event will commemorate one of the most important figures in Polish feminist art, Natalia LL who passed on August 12, a week after opening of Sleepless in Warsaw.

Metamorphosis/Dafne is a sound composition devoted to victims of gendered violence and was inspired by the story of Daphne (in Polish “Dafne”), the mythological nymph who escaped rape by self-transformation into a tree. In the artist words, the sound evokes “the escape from the violence as marked by her death but also by reincarnation into a new life form.” Movements 1-4 (Kataigis, Drzewo Życia, Fonî, and Keîmai) are based on the recordings of the artist’s acoustic piano improvisations, later recomposed by Weiss into an electronic sound. For the 5th movement ( Metá ), the artist recorded eight vocalists individually and later remixed those tracks into a microtonal and antiphonal chorus. Metamorphosis was mastered at the Experimental Media Arts (EMA) and will be included as an online sound companion to the artist’s forthcoming 6-months public project Nirbhaya, scheduled to open in 2023 at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, the Gateway to United Nations in New York.

At the end of the 1970s, Gustowska, until then primarily involved in photography, began working with film, conducting the important intermedia project Relative Features of Resemblance. She invited several pairs of twin girls to join her, recording them during meetings held over weeks, months and the passing years. In doing so, she explored the experiences, feelings and sensations of the women, who continue to be an enduring inspiration to her. According to Gustowska: I remember the first works in the series of Relative Features of Resemblance and my thinking about twinning as an unusual example of duplicity, and how my twinning with my brother seemed poor in relation to the intense biological bond of two women -monozygotic twins. The twins, W. and H. the heroic heroines of this series, seemed identical to me, and how I decided that the body of one would be the matrix for the other.

Women’s Art at Galeria ON, Poznań, 1980 was one of the first exhibitions of art created by women in Poland. The curators of the exhibition were the artists and participants Izabella Gustowska and Krystyna Piotrowska. Gustowska presented her film Relative Features of Resemblance. Other participants were: Natalia LL, Anna Kutera, Ewa Partum , Maria Pinińska-Bereś, and Teresa Tyszkiewicz. The exhibition was a presentation of media art grown on the basis of conceptualism and performance art created by women. Women’s Art was a feminist exhibition – all the artists presenting their works undertook a conscious critique of patriarchal society, making statements about sexuality and identity of fellow women. Galeria ON was run for 35 years by female artists affiliated with the Magdalena Abakanowicz University of Arts in Poznań.