From the Periphery: Alternative Futures and Speculative Storytelling – MutualArt.com

The practices of a number of Eastern European artists posit complex counternarratives to dominant Western patriarchal epistemology.

Zuza Golinska Eye Drop Cinema, 2019, by Marcel Kaczmarek

The counternarrative to the binary, Western-capitalist value system has taken a prominent position in contemporary art discourse within recent years. To nurture alternative vocabularies and fluid epistemologies vis-a-vis the dominant structures, knowledge and history of Western, anthropocentric capitalism is a crucial form of resistance within creative communities and beyond. Eastern Europe occupies a curious in-between terrain within the context of the dominant/marginal perspective and narrative, often labelled as the periphery, with a peculiar heritage of post-communism, recent authoritarian and nationalist political waves, and a particular relationship to retro-nostalgia. A number of Eastern European artists posit such complex counternarratives as perceiving intimacies and networks of knowledge, creating complex and precarious bodies and ecosystems that speculate about alternative forms of living and dying.

Polish multidisciplinary artist Zuza Goliskas work investigates the often-invisible politics between the human body and consciousness, and its architecture. Working primarily with sculpture and installation, her speculative environments prompt their participants to reconsider and compare their physical and psychological relationship to the public spaces and environments around them, whether through hostile structures like her Piercers (2018) or attempts to institute leisure and care within public architecture such as the lounge she created for her project Eye Drop (2019). Part of her investigation is how the physical and ideological reality of the Eastern Bloc influenced her identity and material language.

Zuza Golinska SUNS by Marcel Kaczmarek

Goliskas practice is rooted in a variety of visual references from a kind of raw, brutalist post-industrial materiality to dystopian science fiction and pre-modernism. Inspired by the radical Arte Povera movement of the 1970s, her materials are often chosen as symbolic elements of gendered socio-political narrative around labor and industry, such as recycled steel from a shipyard in her hometown of Gdansk. Her Suns (2019) sculptures and her recent installation Red Giant (2021) at Wroclaw Contemporary projects such narratives into a cosmic perspective, fused with post-apocalyptic speculation. Her tall, totemic figures are inspired by Slavic pagan religions that worshipped the goddess Solntse (the Sun), mapping out an alternative future in light of the ongoing climate crisis. Inherently participatory in their nature, Goliskas spatial interventions manifest both as robust, large-scale structures and as subtle challenges to the hierarchical politics of public architecture and space.

Moving from the industrial to the organic, Polish artist Agnieszka Brzeaska interjects various aspects of our anthropocentric, techno-capitalist cosmology through a holistic practice spanning over painting, ceramics, sculpture, sound and installation. Brzeaska who is also a practicing herbalist is interested in breaking down systemic ontological binaries and constructing new visual and sensorial paradigms to understand our relationship to other humans and non-humans. In this she draws on alternative knowledges from parapsychology, magical thinking, vernacular histories, Slavic mythology and matriarchal traditions, all of which have been marginalized by dominant Western patriarchal epistemology.

Agnieszka Brzezanska, so remember the liquid ground, installation view at eastcontemporary. Courtesy of eastcontemporary and the artist, milan 2021

Her evocative paintings fuse geometric shapes with organic and anthropomorphic motifs, reminiscent of the abstract conceptual works of Hilma af Klimt, Emma Kunz and Georgia OKeeffe. Her recent exhibition So remember the liquid ground (2020) at eastcontemporary in Milan takes water as its framework and the source of life and knowledge. This body of work maps how both real and fictional mythologies around aquatic ecosystems and liquidity impact our relationship to communicating with and relating to our environment and each other, as well as how we structure collective and individual memory, knowledge and information. In her installation for The World National Park (2019-2020) at the Museum of Sculpture in Warsaw she reestablishes the entire planet as an intermingled, utopian realm of kinship, mutual responsibility and matriarchal community.

Agnieszka Brzeaska, World National Park 26.10.2019-2.3.2020 Xawery Dunikowski Museum of Sculpture, Installation view , Warsaw photo. Szymon Rogiski

A similar multispecies sensibility permeates the video and installation works of Romanian artist Nona Inescus practice, which is concerned with the channels through which we perceive, experience and relate to our ever-changing environment and ecosystem, from the immediate and bodily to the mediated and technological. Thinking through paradigms of non-anthropocentrism, ecological and feminist theory, local mythologies and posthumanism, she explores alternative networks and relations through video, photography and sculptural installation with a refined sensitivity towards her choice textures. Casting or embedding organic forms in artificial, sleek or polished materials, she creates a particular corporeal tension that reflects the vital friction of interspecies encounters.

Nona Inescu, Afloat (Victoria amazonica) I and II, 2021 (Photo by Camilla Maria Santini) chrome-plated pressed steel, glass lens, 100 x 15 cm

Her previous bodies of work such as Lithosomes (2017) at EXILE in Berlin contextualized rocks as complex bodies and conduits for new avenues of ontological understanding, connecting prehistoric narratives to the now by constructing radical, overarching intimacies. Exploring the concept of vital materiality, Inescu engages the viewer with a broader possible relational understanding of inanimate objects and plant life. A more recent show Waterlily Jaguar (2019) at SpazioA manifests eco-feminist modes of survival unfolding through the waterlily species and their complex web of mythologies that present a site of speculative resistance network, exploring ways of living and dying in the face of hegemonic systems and the impending climate catastrophe through a hydro-feminist framework.

Nona Inescu, Waterlily Jaguar, exhibition view, 2021, SpazioA, Pistoia (Photo by Camilla Maria Santini)

Also drawing inspiration from hybrid mythologies, Czech artist Anna Hulaov grew up in a Czech village with a family of small farmers and carpenters. Referring to herself as a retro-fetishist, her sculptural figures borrow tropes from Socialist-realism and Soviet brutalist architecture, merging humanoid features with animals, plants, machines and mythical characters from Greek to Slavic folklore. This complex, decidedly non-hierarchical hybridity also emerges within the material dimension of Hulaovs work, fusing industrial media such as cement and wood with more organic, bodily textures like honeycomb, manifesting intricate ecological networks.

Anna Hulacova, Society, 2016, Jindrich Chalupecky award, wood, honey combs

Hulaov'spractice steers the vocabulary of post-communist nostalgia into the territory of the future and into utopian/dystopian speculation. Labor is another important dimension to her work, particularly interested in how 1950s agricultural collectivization policies affected rural microcosms. Her work Cosmonauts (2018) is a cement relief depicting two beekeepers with their hands in the air like astronauts on a Soviet poster, contrasting naive Space Age optimism with the dystopian ecological prospects of the present. In her recent exhibition at Pedro Cera, The Next Shift (2021), her sculptures are feminine bodies performing rituals of care and domestic labor, their cemented bodies merging with sewing machines, whisks and houseplants.

Anna Hulaov, The Next Shift at Pedro Cera, Lisbon, 2021, Exhibition view, Photo Bruno Lopes, Courtesy of the artist and Pedro Cera, Lisbon

The exploration of an intermingled vocabulary of form weaves through all four practices as a common thread. Seeking to blur boundaries between species, as well as rigid systems of fact/fiction and classifications, the complex bodies, membranes and ecosystems brought to life in the works present precarious, radical sites of intimacy and resistance through the framework of speculation rooted in a peripheral perspective.

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From the Periphery: Alternative Futures and Speculative Storytelling - MutualArt.com