Patrycja Orzechowska

In the past cabinets of curiosity held collections of exhibits, rare specimens, findings and monstrosities from far parts of the world.¹ These valuable “rubbish heaps” signified the triumph of humanity and science as well as proved human helplessness in the face of natural laws, mysteries and the triumph of human creativity. Almost every cabinet was treated as a “microcosm”—”a reduced universe,” in which particular objects represented different branches, fields and questions—a universe which could be taken in at a glance. In its different meanings, the cabinet has always been a hidden place, a private space or a discrete place.

The Cabinet by Partycja Orzechowska is yet another embodiment of “cabinet”—a collection of her private experiences, observations, and thoughts—an image of the world and complex human nature recorded in photographic cycles. The imagined intermingles with the real, while gestures and signs form symbolic figures.

The technique of these works is as important as their content. It enables the content to interact with light and open hidden spaces. The surfaces of lunatype are not flatly closed, but they shimmer and their inner living matter catches the eye. This gives an illusion of the presence of “the other side”—an inner world, which does not give in to the spectator’s gaze, but is an observing subject itself. In this world, there is hidden a mystery. The whole creates a peculiar atmosphere of suspension between the visible and the invisible, the real and the imagined. This atmosphere reminds of the first daguerreotypes, among which not only portraits or landscapes are found, but also objects and social scenes, whose meanings are difficult to decipher today. As a result of charm and mystery of technology, fragments of reality fixed in frames seduced spectators by sending and returning the signs. The works by Orzechowska function in a similar way – the density and significance of their content leads to a very strong, reciprocal relation between the spectator and the work. Thus, they encourage a search for extra-aesthetic reflections on the power and meaning of a visual message in the “remains,” which are used by the artist. Hence, Orzechowska’s photographs are neither a record of reality nor its artistic interpretation, but rather they constitute a medium for basic values: states, emotions and feelings concerning every human being.

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The world of Orzechowska is composed of distinct elements, images, and gestures, which form thematic cycles. Each of the cycles focuses our attention on the complexity of human nature and dualistic character of the world. Its shape is built out of fragments, whereas the used “traces” indicate the most important motifs-cycles: women, still lives and gestures. The Cabinet establishes the rules among them, maintaining the balance between the static and the dynamic, the living and the artificial, the real and the imagined. Yet it does not uncover what we would like to know, what we expect at the first sight. The faces will remain hidden and absent, the interiors covered the gestures ambiguous.

The first and third room exhibit works entitled The Veil, The Curtains and The End. The veil signifies a partition, it indicates the existence of two worlds: outer and inner. Thus, it constitutes a kind of initiation portal, whose transgression is linked to good graces. In the first lunatype, it is tightly closed, draped, and still. In the second one it is pulled aside, partially uncovering a black abyss behind. Out of the abyss legs emerge, implicitly suggesting the presence of a human being. This “object” abandoned on the border of two arbitrary spaces seems to be a derelict and accidental prop. It is not known, whether we take part in the first act, or the epilogue, whether we will know the truth and solve the mystery lying on the border of two woman’s worlds. In the second work with the curtain motif there remains an inscription—”The End,” which flows down from the upper part of the curtain—a motif ending film screenings and the time divided with a narrated story from the real life. Even though we recognize the conventional division into the real and the imagined, a drawn curtain always provokes one to gaze into the world hidden behind it. It tempts with the unknown, tantalizingly promising to satisfy our curiosity despite the price it takes to pay for the key to the mystery. These longings will remain unfulfilled. We can only envy the woman, who is gazing behind the curtain, sealed in this gesture forever.

The consecutive cycles are created in an analogical scheme, evoking polarized states and changeable emotions. The works from the Still Life cycle balance between the natural, living and biological on the one hand, and the dead, passive and artificial on the other. The artist has chosen two motifs—eyelashes and wigs—items suspended between the dead and the alive, the object and the subject. These elements are woman’s props and attributes of her femininity. Severed from their user and displayed against neutral backgrounds, they change into dead trinkets or simulations of real parts of the body. These objects, when posed and devoid of their functions, evoke both admiration and terror. Each can be linked to a different story, person or memory. Displayed against pearl-mirror backgrounds, they play the role of “natural hieroglyphs”—the media of meaning, whose significance points to the forbidden and inescapable dimension of human existence—passing.

The middle room surprises with order and sharpness of motives from the Gymnastics Studies cycle. These are the only images of women where faces are directed at the spectator. Some are serious and concentrated others smiling and flirtatious; all merge into decorative compositions. All the women are dressed in gymnasts’ outfits and are repeating the same gestures. This innocent training serves the purpose of lending the living “figures” a particular shape. One can easily recognize in the women’s frozen gestures a splashing fountain, a spider, a flower bud, an insect or a solar circle. On the walls, just beneath the photographs, there are their equivalents—drawings of the same motives made with ease and clear, innocent design. All of them allude to organic character and female nature; all are endowed with many meanings and stories. The drawings are in contrast to the precise photographic compositions, whereas youth and vitality of the models emphasized by their playful smiles is juxtaposed with their orderliness and stiff postures.

Surprising combinations of the familiar and the alien, the living and the dead, the uncovered and the covered recurs in the majority of The Cabinet works. The Double Self-Portrait remains anonymous, even though we can suspect that the relations between the represented women are intimate. We do not see their faces, but the composition, in which they are turned back from the viewer and facing each other, makes us believe that their contact, though elusive for the spectator, is exceptionally strong and enduring. The consecutive works—a collage of cutout newspaper head shapes constitutes simply a collection of “empty” hairdos, whereas frames of an undressing woman in the work Uncovering-Covering represent a gesture which is simultaneously both.

The majority of images constitute central compositions. Only a few are composed diagonally, which emphasises the meaning of model’s movement or gesture. Such a solution occurs in the cycles The Balloon, Balloons or Uncovering-Covering. In the first two works the passive is changed into the active, movement is contrasted with rest. The balloon signifies a life lived to the full, biological physicality of the woman, but it is also a perfect form, an embodiment of wholeness and eternity. In the second cycle, the never-ending phases of dressing and undressing constitute a continuous record of a movement, in this case without beginning or end. Such a composition evokes feelings parallel to the ones we experience standing behind a tightly drawn curtain, finding abandoned attributes of femininity or self-portraits, whose identity we will never be sure of.

One of the last/first works presented at the exhibition is Taboo. It depicts a figure of a masked shadow-guide, who, using gestures, utters consecutive letters of the word T A B O O .² This person ushers us into the forbidden, untouchable, hidden sphere, which requires tranquility and intimacy. The image contains many questions—it is impossible to guess her identity or her role. In addition, the performed gestures remain incomprehensible for many. It remains unknown whether we will meet a guard, a guide or a woman who will tell us her story. Nevertheless, the composition, character and the manner of representation make us presume what will happen—a meeting with the “remains” of experiences and emotions hidden in the successive nooks and corners in the pictures; the “remains” which everyone has to uncover in a distinct way. The process of balancing on the border of two realities, female natures and emotions constitutes a significant, if not the most important element of the exhibition. This is probably the key to the interpretation of the photographic images, the key to the heart of the artist, who lets us glance at the intimate world of the woman.

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The Cabinet by Orzechowska is a story told in pictures. This kind of narration requires engagement and concentration from the spectator. There is no one explicit way of getting to know it. There are no logical sequences of events or episodes, but rather single traces, which focus our attention on significant fragments. This non-linear structure is analogical to the strategy of contemporary narrative forms and the specificity of “the culture of flexibility.” Alicja Kępińska, referring to Jean-François Lyotard, Umberto Eco and Roland Barthes, writes about a narration free from an obligation to represent and produce complete sequences. This liberated narration can freely move “in different directions and different spaces.”³ It can emerge fragmentarily, abandoning its own plots, beginning new ones or leading into side-ways, which then suddenly end without reason. Frozen women fixed in their studied poses, multiplications and body parts accidentally abandoned need to be collected and connected individually by each spectator. This peculiar “game” with “remains” of a bigger whole is more interested in the states of soul and hidden desires than in everyday life. In modernity “cabinets of curiosity” fascinated with their fragmentariness and accessibility of the unknown and mysterious worlds, which were becoming a new whole in the eyes of spectators. Orzechowska’s works seduce with a mysterious space of inner emotions, which are uncovered through fragments of the real world. The forbidden constitutes its integral part. Even though we will never know the mystery, The Cabinet enables one to experience the atmosphere of the untouchable and the hidden.