The first week-long solo exhibition by Monika Zawadzki “A Man with Two Seesaws” was presented at the PinchukArtCentre in Kyiv as a part of the Transfer program. Transfer is an exchange program that promotes and supports the new generation of Ukrainian artists abroad, and also represents young Polish art in Ukraine. It is realized in collaboration with the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, the most influential Polish art institution.
Monika Zawadzki creates sculptures, paintings, and video. The exhibition will include three new produced works: a sculpture A Man with Two Seesaws, a site-specific mural painting, and a new sound work consisting of a conversation between the author and Maria Lanko. Video Jumping Rope that was created in 2009 will be presented at the exhibition as well. Artistic manager of the PinchukArtCentre and curator of the show Bjorn Geldhof says: “Zawadzki develops a language which combines graphic strategies with a thorough research of formation of cultural and private identities. With these new works that are presented at the exhibition the artist makes a new step in her work by combining different media to create a complex multidimensional discourse.”
In the past Zawadzki was a poster graphic artist and designer, and even made illegal graffiti. She is a novice to gallery art, where she has only been for the past three years. Her previous experience permeates her style, with its black-and-white color scheme, and plain lines. Thus, the mural consisting of two pieces, with rather weird names A Woman Enters, Sits Down on a Chair, and Takes Another Chair on Her Lap and A Woman Enters, Sits Down on a Chair, while Another Chair Enters and Sits on Her Head, shows very conventional, pictographic, genderless human silhouettes, suggesting road signs, and chairs. A Man with Two Seesaws is in fact a dismembered human body on two seesaws. Yet it is still a pictographic, conventional body, an image taken to pieces and laid out on two big seesaws, standing still.
In the similarly black-and-white Jumping Rope the body is quite recognizable as human and male, but it is hanging in the air: instead of skipping ecstatically, it loses and regains a clear shape.
Zawadzki’s work combines the minimalism of graphic and graffiti forms with obviously surrealistic content elements. It is the combination of conventional images and the surrealistic cruelty and metaphysicalness that makes the exhibit especially fascinating.
Overall, the project Transfer comprises five exhibits. During one month the Ukrainian public will see expositions by Agnieszka Polska (September 4-9), Konrad Smolenski (September 11-16), Nicolas Grospierre (September 18-23), and Michal Budny (September 25-30). A number of public presentations, too, are scheduled as part of the exchange program: Ewa Gorzadek’s Motion, sound, and image: Polish video art from historical and contemporary viewpoints on September 9, at 6 p.m.; Agnieszka Pindera’s Team players. Polish art groups on September 12, at 7 p.m.; and Daniel Muzyczuk’s Resonating space. Polish sound art on September 19, at 7 p.m. The final discussion is scheduled for September 26.
