Patrycja Orzechowska

This exhibition is about us insofar as it is about the objects that, to some extent, we as humans have brought to life. Above all, however, it will be about the “dark side” of things. The one that pulls back from any relationship with humans. It is there, even if we weren’t.

The exhibition of works by Patrycja Orzechowska features a collection of puzzling objects containing temporary alliances. Immersing oneself in its sensorium, one can easily recognise some of its parts: hook, rust, soft, hard, earth, clay, skewer, nail, cage, fold, vessel, difference: full/empty. Recognition is based on difference. This is where we start. Using sight, we recognise some arrangements of lines as human facial features (it’s an evolutionary adaptation), two elongated triangles, that’s scissors. But what happens when the calculating legibility of the function given to objects by their creators is obliterated, when they lose their economic sense? Intelligence, whether human or artificial, craves references, comparisons, parallels. It ignores the obscure which, from its perspective, is meaningless.

Orzechowska’s objects work on this tension. They hook on to associations and hold on for as long as they can. They attract and in a moment repel. They withdraw from the first emotions and draw the gaze into strange, paradoxical interpretations that defy the dating of the artist’s collected objects. They create new combinations, but none of them are permanent or definitive.

One can see in them a picture of the depression of an anthropocentric, rational world and the growing influence — and unclear competence — of self-learning neural networks. Temporarily joined together, entangled for a moment only by a wire or rubber band, these things can also be understood differently. For their structure has a magical syntax. It draws on the connections between art and the pre-linguistic and pre-rational performativity of action in the world, known from shamanism and other religious rituals.

The objects presented in the exhibition tell a non-linear story in which time and space are curved. If we could see the human story of the world as a plane, it would be torn to shreds and crumpled. What we look at, on the other hand, are only snippets of the reality in which we participate. The artist intuitively refers to the still unclear properties of matter and to the first impulses of human action with it, which aim to negotiate the possibility of survival.