Grażyna M. Olszewska. Apparitions

Mamidło – Polish:
  1. something that lures and attracts;
  2. an illusion, a vision.

Grażyna Olszewska creates a multi-threaded story about authenticity and tests various ways of designing reality. She analyses contemporary methods of image creation, focusing on the suspension between the physical and virtual, the project and its completion. The exhibition at Kronika consists of several interrelated works, all of which set the scene for further developments. The spectators become extras in someone else's play, film or spot. The generation of social situations and the creation of artificial crowds is a strategy the artist shares with political movements and corporations. Those who want to create their own images or shift the attention away from more pressing issues use people as the background for their credibility-building activities.

Arranging situations, adopting masks and constructing one's own image are elements of political performance which can be successfully used in the process of private emancipation and transgression of limitations. The artist combines social and technological themes, showing how tools functioning simultaneously in the fields of art, media and politics enhance the possibilities of self-creation. She is interested in new technologies, not only because of their ability to falsify reality, but also as tools for creating new layers and overlapping meanings. 

Her interests in architecture, film and digital technologies visible in her artistic practice, serve Olszewska to explore the relationship between emotions and space. At Kronika she continues to reflect on such issues in the context of an institution of art. While testing ways of designing experiences, she is trying to discover what happens to art and its audiences between an exhibition in a gallery and its documentation in the digital space. 

 

Grażyna Olszewska (1991) - visual artist and creator of digital realities, she is excited by the dummy-like character of the 3D environment and its potentially infinite possibilities. She belonged to the Młode Suki performance collective and the Koleżanki group. She is a graduate of the Academy of Art in Szczecin and of the Cultural Studies Faculty at the University of Silesia. She was awarded the Grand Prix at the Młode Wilki 19 festival. Her works were presented, among others, at Trafostacja Sztuki in Szczecin, the BWA Wrocław, the Survival festival and the Piktogram gallery. 

 

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