Patrycja Orzechowska

More or less conscious search for order and harmony is one of the most important cravings of our life. Taking a closer look at the critical trend in the Polish art from the 1990s enables us to trace the ways artists take to pursue that goal, to see how far they can go in sacrificing their emotions, experience and life. The loud debate on the right to one’s own body and strong opposition against subjecting it to violence by political, social and religious systems were to restore dignity of an individual. To restore it to the society as worthy of interest and accepted with its distinctiveness. In many cases the artists’ actions were and still are concentrated on themselves, in other cases—on the work with the excluded. A psychological method, which has become the basis of Patrycja Orzechowska’s newest project entitled Settings¹/exercises presented in December 2009 in The Gdańsk Gallery of Photography, could represent a new attempt to heal social relations. The author has taken on the transfer of the constellations therapy into photo-film installations forms, asking a question on the possibility of restoring proper order of things: appropriate family relations, correct attitude to partners, appropriate recognition and evaluation of one’s emotions that can secure inner peace.

Orzechowska has referred to the controversial—for many therapists—family constellations method created by Bert Hellinger—a German psychologist, philosopher and former friar. Hellinger worked as a missionary with African tribes for 16 years, so in his therapy verbal communication is limited to minimum. The system aimed at healing twisted and broken bonds, so to say their reactivation, relies on the group work where given individuals play the roles of client’s family members. By the use of codified gestures unrelated people described by their functions: mother, father, wife, grandfather, illness etc. stimulate somebody’s reality. The client is often surprised by the spontaneity of their actions. Depending on sensibility the constellation participants experience very strong emotions. Therapist’s short description of their roles frequently causes the state close to despair. It is a purifying sensation for both the client—who observes the scheme of his/her family relations with full clarity—and the actor—who experiences somebody else’s pain. The fact that people are prone to undergo deep suffering has interested the artist. Out of the frames of the healing drama has revealed the dangerous proximity of sadomasochist practice. We like to feel afraid, to be moved and excited. Why do we like to suffer? Emotional pain perhaps stands today for and enables real sensation. Maybe loneliness, difficulties in building and sustaining relations with the others is caused by our self-centeredness. How credulously we surrender to strong personalities. Transposing Hellinger’s schemes to photographic installation Orzechowska asks to what extent we—people living in society—are free and how much we are manipulated by the others. She also points out the issue of potentiality to overcome the sense of guilt felt towards our next of kin which simultaneously marks the new opening of one’s life.

There are extreme views on Hellinger in contemporary psychology. Many treat his method as a revelation, others consider it to be a hoax. The system of simplifications is certainly a very creative and visually attractive form of psychotherapy in which a patient participates in a new description of reality and additionally, stimulated by the words and gestures of the others, learns how to control one’s fate. Everyone voluntarily creates a kind of a spectacle. Orzechowska has treated it as an experimental model in which she participated. Her creation at the exhibition was doubly reinforced by the introduction of professional actors in the photographic sessions and directing that situation.

What’s interesting, the author has treated photography as a nonmaterial medium. This is close to Stefan Wojnecki’s thought about relationships of photography with the ancient art and practices of magical objects because it refers to images found in the world but only noted and preserved.²

Metaphysics that is close to ceremonialism is even more evident in the video installation in which tension is being built by the story told by the actors and the form synchronically joining all the dramas. Overwhelming calmness characterizes each presentation. Instinctively sensed emotional struggle can be seen only in concealed sobbing.

Even though Orzechowska has repeatedly used in her works the motives and forms taken from performative arts—dance, theatre and cinema—this time she has referred to theatre as a visual and ideological key to the exhibition structure—the exposition joining the series of more than 20 small in size photographs with 5-channel video installation. The image shows figures of different age and sex. The actors were treated like trained competitors unified even by their outfits. Ideological dimension of played roles of e.g. mother, child, illness, death were symbolized by human figure. Participants’ images often presented in symbolic way were enriched by graphic description of their relationships. Notes on margin, mathematical formulas, typographic symbols enable the viewer to guess the theme of a given study.

There are many references to Christian iconography in those studies; like The Vigrin and Child with St. Anne—in Orzechowska’s work represented by the husband embraced by the wife and her brother—a constellation healing relationships between spouses due to the contact with a brother. An interesting transposition represents Adoration of the Magi in which the son bows to the father, grandfather and great-grandfather. Hellinger’s male-centered point of view on world’s equilibrium is a little irritating in his method, that’s why many constellations are subordinate in their character and this is usually a female figure who symbolizes death, illness or addiction. In her video installation entitled Better the artist has presented it in a different manner. Here the characters are “stigmatized” by the author herself—a woman who leads them onto the stage—a space of impressive emptiness and loneliness of single figures. Their trauma expressed by a pantomime gesture is stressed by the silence interrupted only sometimes by one word: better. A word-synonym for success in therapy, a word that summarizes all of the unspoken stories—mother’s and daughter’s, son’s and father’s, daughter’s and father’s and man’s—single in his constellation as if to contradict the others. Orzechowska portrays the message in an interesting way as the whole installation—five synchronized images presented on irregularly placed screens—creates a kind of choreographic scene configuration. Its positive message is however more casual and represents more critical view on striving for order. Looking for order also manifests itself in cosmic chaos of the screen saver that is surrounded by drawings in the gallery. The artist has expressed the principles of Hellinger’s method in an almost instructional way by the use of chalk on a blackboard. The work has become a legend to be used in deciphering the meaning of the exposition and produces new possibilities of interpretation.

Settings/exercises examine the limits of habits and possibilities of changing oneself but also ask a sincere question on reasons of obstructions in personal development and disabilities in building social relations. Especially today, in the time of identity crisis, this theme appears to be particularly interesting. Even though the artist doesn’t approve of Hellinger’s method, she points at how we, desperately looking for safety, are subjected to socio-technical manipulation. Transferring this phenomenon to tangled social relations, material-, religious- and ethnic-based conflicts one may say that artists are those who can build brave new world and heal its members. However in Patrycja Orzechowska’s method there is no room for coup d’état, revolution or crusade. Contemporary socially engaged art has thus been enriched by yet another tool: calm, noiseless assignment of a place by acquiring the ability to describe oneself in a new way.