Whether the glass is half empty or half full depends on what we name it. Or how we recognize it. It remains the same glass. Małgorzata Mazur works with film on a daily basis—as a cinematographer, documentary director, and lecturer. The painting and drawing she has practiced regularly for years are her intimate activities, a private record. Many of these images consist of small and large triangles. They look like the reassembled shards of a broken jug. A jug, like a glass, is a shape that gives form to what it contains. When the jug breaks, its contents spill out. Reassembled fragments will not restore the jug’s function, but they remain a testament to the breaking. Małgorzata Mazur enchants her experiences into the form of pictorial parables. These stories are magical, ritualistic. We see an approach to a mountain. Many shots of the mountain. It is a meditation that leads the author through pregnancy to childbirth. Painting accompanied the creator through the anxieties and joys of becoming a mother—the transformation of the body and its preparation to bring forth a new body. This record is a process of "coming to oneself" as a mother. In Mazur's paintings, figures of soldiers in helmets and camouflage often appear. Soldiers urinating on each other in a circle, soldiers dying in the forest and transforming into plants. In conversation with the artist, we tried to trace when the figure of the soldier first appeared for her. It turned out that a young man as a soldier was a frequent presence in her childhood due to her father's work. A young man was simply, very often, a young man in camouflage. Now, the motif of the man-as-soldier takes on an additional, real dimension with the war happening beside us. In Mazur's work, we see dying soldiers, soldiers in the woods, soldiers turning into trees and into the forest. It is a story of birth and death.
Przemysław Czepurko is a multi-media artist—a creator of paintings, films, objects, and scenography. The exhibition The Glass is Half Empty consists of a composition of six selected paintings. In these works, we see symbolic shorthand: a human skull, eyes in a vice, the artist's mother's lips, sticks of dynamite, burning sailing ships, two mountains with a drawing of an eye superimposed. By placing selected motifs on canvas, the artist analyzes their form and the meanings they carry. What do eyes do? Do eyes look, or do they merely receive visual impulses? What do eyes do when they look at a painting of eyes? What do eyes do when they look at a painting depicting a medieval engraving of eyes in a vice? Eyes long, eyes cry. Or they no longer long, they no longer cry. One day they will stop longing. From a mother, the lips remain. An image of lips remains. The drawing of the lips is very distinctive. We can recognize a person by their lips. Or ourselves, when we were small and our mother moved her lips before our eyes. These are images that constitute memory as long as the person carrying that memory lives. When a person dies, the image they carried in their memory dies too. An image of looking at a mother's lips. Those lips screamed or laughed. They were stern or sweet. Your being or non-being depended on those lips. Your whole life fit within those lips. Przemysław Czepurko’s paintings are deeply immersed in death while remaining a story about life, childhood, and growing up.
The short story Klucz ("The Key") by Anna Karasińska is read by Anna Kłos. Karasińska directs films and "event-performances." The filmic or theatrical images she creates are an analysis of small, seemingly insignificant gestures, scraps of sensations and memories captured in a dreamlike, warped narrative. The Key could be a record of a dream. The protagonist is a child, or an image of childhood fears. Memories of childhood protect against the abyss of boundless loneliness—a time that is terrifying because one is small and entirely dependent on adults, but also wonderful because one is part of a larger puzzle, connected by a dense web of family dependencies. Anna Kłos is an actress and filmmaker. In her own work, she also deals with the themes of the body, family, inheritance, and the experience of being both mother and daughter.
Birth and death. "We are riding a sleigh... the sleigh moves across the mud, blunt and slow, it is generally hot." Although the narrative of The Key contradicts how things would "seem" to be, beneath the layer of "seeming"—as if under camouflage—it turns out that this is exactly how it is. That this strange, unreal thing was precisely what was. The sleigh moves across the mud.
