IZABELLA GUSTOWSKA

THE CASE OF ANTONINA L....


 

I had long fancied to make an exhibition that would be light, even ‘frivolous’, or perhaps a little infantile, and in pink colours to boot (though I have to admit I have a particular dislike of that colour).

Naturally, I wonder how much I can make my time stretch?

Already in the early 1980s I created my double, while in 2005 I made a definite attempt, calling to life the young artist, Antonina de Lodi (Italian surname of my grandmother).

 It was She who was the author of the work Przyjaciele [Friends] shown at the Art Poznań in 2005. She was also one of the women sought in Media Story SHE shown at the Old Slaughterhouse in 2008, and I saw her among the brides in Love Stories in the Sołacki Park, at the Urban Legend Festival in 2009. I thought I would combine those fragmented situations and show episodes from Antonina’s life in a gallery, or to be more accurate I would hide her among several young women.

Hence, there will be that pink room of hers, featuring projections of spectral quotes from films and TV programmes I used to watch in the 1970s and 1980s, intermingled with topical items taken from You Tube. Hip-hop girls, twins in red tracksuits, engrossed in a 1940s song they do not know (Rum and Coca Cola), sung by Andrew Sisters. And the eighteen-year-old pre-Raphaelite beauties, the triplets Kasia, Ewa and Magda, gazing fixedly into the white rabbit, originating from the 2007 Noisy Boy, as it jumps out of a top hat.

And a circle arrayed from wedding dresses, in a kaleidoscopic projection, absorbing the arduously constructed and quickly disintegrating images from the 2008 Domino Day.

All this is a utopia of sorts, an assemblage – story, steeped in pink and red, and in the endlessly falling artificial snow.

It is a bit of Rosebud from Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. A light story about the days of youth to which there can be no return anymore.

 Izabella Gustowska, 2012

 

The Case of Antonina L...,
Galeria Sztuki Wozownia - Toruń - 2012, kurator - Małgorzata Jankowska