Magda Starska & Iza Tarasewicz

Magda Starska and Iza Tarasewicz create the world which can confuse. Wild and at the same time cosy, primitive and sophisticated. The world close to perceptible reality just like bowels are close to the skin, because artists penetrate reality to investigate its foundation. An explosion of imagination, gemmation of forms are the result of reduction they had made from the very beginning. Looking for an authentic perspective which isn’t culturally mediated, Starska and Tarasewicz reached biologically defined single cell. This comical protozoan they had discovered hardly had appeared than started to create culture. Therefore, though it doesn’t have a gender nor a language, it grows, nurses and cultivates. It is as open and receptive that filtrates from an external world everything what it’s able to absorb, and then it generates new qualities. It repeats series of activities as religious ritual. It absorbs reality as a sponge. Nervous and vital, it builds and blossoms out. Dresses and objects used by artists are shapeless, they disintegrate and flood, spread in all directions as a bush. Spongy costume fulfils aesthetic, but also pragmatic function: it confines a freedom of ‘normal’ functioning, it forces to clumsiness on the edge of an idiocy. It’s a clumsiness in the half of distance between plasma pulsation and the first step of a child. Absurd costume reveals therefore awkwardness characteristic of human being, awkwardness hidden on the margin of reality which here becomes an essential rule.

Receptivity of protozoan reflects an exchange idea which gives sense to artists actions. An exchange is from the one side understood as free drawing from what world can offer, from the other side as giving to the world all possible surplus. Despite of irresistible comicality of protozoan actions, Starska and Tarasewicz construct deep and serious vision. Lightness of an idea goes here with realization of concrete goal: exchange, absorption, inclusion which are the basis of cell functioning and which become here an utopian recipe for functioning of human being in world. The whole undertaking of artists is understood as a gesture in front of spectator, gesture that has to be replied. Elms threads bushes is an joint exhibition of artists who so far, at least on aesthetic level, hadn’t have much in common. Magda Starska use objects to build installations of many components, performative sculptures of explosive mixture of colors. Iza Tarasewicz is connected first of all with sculpture works of minimalist form, with limited materials which she uses with courage of looking into darkness of human nature.

We begin our activity with Starska and Tarasewicz exhibition intentionally because their cooperation reflects an idea of a workshop what Stereo Gallery intends to be. We understand such workshop as a place of inspiration and exchange, as a place which creatively and individually cooperates with artists.

Zuzanna Hadryś Michał Lasota

Magda Starska & Iza Tarasewicz
Elms threads bushes