Exhibition at the GaMA Libre bookstore.
“Few people take the time to really look at a flower. I paint what the flower is to me, yet the viewer sees in it what they bring to that act of looking.” The above words by Georgia O’Keeffe go to the very heart of the question of the threshold at which an encounter with art begins. They suggest that the space extending between a work and its viewer is rarely empty. It is a dense matter filled with what we bring to the act of looking: our biographies, years of experience, knowledge, and lack thereof. Marta Maria Madej’s exhibition invites us to enter this gap, where distance is a space of attentiveness, where genuine curiosity is born rather than a barrier is erected.
The women artists whose works became the point of departure for this exhibition act as seismographs – they register tensions within social reality that are invisible at first glance and translate them into the language of form. The exhibition expands on the series Siła Formy. Pop-up. Artystki polskie XX i XXI wieku (Strength of Form. Pop-up. Polish Women Artists of the 20th and 21st Centuries), where selected works are displayed as movable paper constructions. We see pop-up as something beyond a book technique, as a material and sequential medium that calls for the recipient and combines looking with acting.
The objects on display are no neutral reproductions; each is a subjective record of an encounter, or a sensitive designer’s interpretation of the original. The transfer or translation onto paper preserves the clear difference between the source and its new reading, reminding us that distance and difference are two separate aspects of a relationship. Namely, we can adjust distance, while difference, i.e. the artist’s unique experience, remains unmoved.
The reference to women’s artistic practices is here an act of political and mnemonic significance. It shortens the distance created by the systemic absence of these names from the canon, creating conditions in which learning begins with an impulse of curiosity, and knowledge about the artist develops as a natural consequence of engagement.
Within the system of “mechanisms of sensitivity”, touch transforms attention: it slows down the act of looking, directs it towards details and builds empathy towards the fragile materiality of paper. Viewers are no longer merely observers; they participate in the revelation of form and, through their gesture, bring their own presence into the work.
Since we bring ourselves into the act of looking, let us give ourselves a chance for an encounter that involves the body and emotions. Therefore, at this exhibition: YOU CAN TOUCH THE OBJECTS.
The exhibition presents the doctoral work by Marta Maria Madej, MA, entitled Mechanisms of Sensitivity. Pop-up as a Medium of Encounter with Art, completed at the Faculty of Design of the Art Academy Szczecin under the supervision of Prof. Anna Witkowska.
