Through painting I express my perception of reality, it’s also a way of working through memory.

Following the affiliation saved in the DNA, an attempt to state it precisely, place it in history and to understand the context of fate of close rela- tives inevitably leads to a confrontation with the history of a group my ancestors shared the fate with.

Memory doesn’t only mean recalling and digging up but also reminding and warning.

At the exhibition in Lublin I introduce the people to basement spaces with all their peculiarities and characteristics, it’s not a sheer conceptual ac- tion – the aim I managed to achieve was to engage the emotions of the spectators (fear, a sense of danger – or safety, an optical movement in a static picture)

There are 5 rooms – 5 stories making up for one narration, a narration that concerns the problem of memory – its quality, condition, ability of be- ing passed on.

The basement as a place. A basement of Lublin. An abstract place of many fates – executions and hiding, but also concealment of family stories.

CONCEALMENT [DISLOCATION OF THE WORLD]
It’s an internal emigration. The closing of the world in us with all the present baggage of memories, emotions and experiences.

It’s a reminiscence. One experiences the experienced in a complete isolation. Reconstructs the map of life.
Travels in time, while staying in one space.
It’s a projection. The basement room becomes the whole world.

Contemplates and covers present routes.

A time burned out of a biography and burned in a biography to avoid …
The ash shows the uniformity of fate.
All the individual human stories end physically one way – considering this we don’t differ from each other. The rest remains in form of a record – in the memory of the ones alive and in documents of history, that burned in different circumstances.

EXECUTION [ROZGAŁĘZIANKA]
An energetic memory of things you cannot delete but it spreads (out), radiates even from beneath earth like a damaged nerve. An act accomplished with no reflection, “trivially” and with such automatism as school drawings.

What are these two rooms?
Silence, oblivion, separation of the past that only lives in memory.

ONE, TWO, THREE… [ONE-ARMED BANDIT]
Build stories we regard as our owns. Sometimes it’s the twist of fate. Scraps of passed on stories, left unsaid.
As Albert Einstein said, half-truth is a whole lie.
Looking for the whole truth is a game.

The one-armed bandit is a metaphor of this search and its mechanism.
We play for a coherent image, a new memory.
How big is the chance to get to a full image, to rebuild it from scraps, from what’s left behind in the minds and on sheets of paper, as graves won’t speak, especially as you can’t position them in spite of trying to regain the language?

OIL-PAINTED DADO [SOAKING]
Involuntarily, systematically we are protected, isolated either by the automatism of our brain supporting the unwelcomed, heavy, unwanted or by the surrounding or a system that protects and preaches an official version of history, promoting a single narration, one minorities often don’t fit in. School silence.
Separates the immaterial level of oil-painted dado.

The oil-painted dado only reaches a certain height, it doesn’t obscure our point of view, we don’t have to perk, only concentrate and strain our eyes. We have a lot on our level of eyes. We are able to see.
It’s only an appointed, convenient level of unawareness, sometimes ignorance and sometimes necessary separation to be able to live, live an ordinary course – ahead.

Sometimes, however, that’s not enough – life becomes an imitation. There’s a need of filling it with consciousness there is no freedom without it, one that – as we know – is continuously renewed and not something given once.
You have to notice the soaked ceilings, flooded walls and the hygienic artificiality of separation of these spheres. To risk, to play with your pre- destination or – on the other side – with the randomness of life.

I
My memory – experience of an individual – stored and processed in the brain, but also the physical one that causes us to become a form of re- cording and medium.

The whole exhibition is connected by a circulation of body fluids – closed and open at the same time. It’s found in one organism (the exhibition is one), but it connects us to our ancestors through the DNA memory it contains.