A nugget in the midst of the expansive, heterogeneous unpacking of the Venice Biennale 2022 exhibition, “The Milk of Goals,” the photographic collection Mama, created in 2018 by the Polish artist Aneta Grzeszykowska, is as disturbing as it's upsetting. Reactivating the subversive themes pricey to the Surrealists via the fetishized figure of the model and the puppet, the photographer (born in 1974 in Warsaw) levels her daughter enjoying dolls with the silicone duplicate of her personal truncated physique (lowered to a bust). Broken down into tender and bucolic scenes, the macabre recreation, declined with a delicate duplicity in colour and in black and white, takes a morbid and disturbing flip when the fetish physique not provides the phantasm (by means of the framing of the bust or the subterfuges of the mise en scène) and seems as it's: a bit of inanimate physique – placed right here, on a bed, proper up towards the body of the kid lying down, there, in a cart pulled by the woman on the water’s edge, or deserted in a deck chair. We understand then that it's with demise that the little woman performs, after having floated the simulacrum, with its giant, open eyes, at her aspect in the murky waters of the lake, and eventually burying it within the earth. From doll to corpse, there is just one step…
Oscillating between dream and nightmare, sweetness and cruelty, on the sting of surrealist phantasmagoria and horror film, Aneta Grzeszykowska’s images-fictions play with ambivalence (animate/inanimate, presence/absence) and the inversion of roles (mother/youngster, topic/object) in an insidious method that creates uneasiness within the spectator, and thus provokes a reflection on id, but in addition on cruelty and perversion, submission and disappearance.
Truncated bodies, fetishes and puppets… that look like alive; our bodies in items sculpted (from prostheses and animal skins) and photographed (Selfie, 2014); dismembered or dissolved our bodies, “absorbed” by darkness, in choreographed fictions (Black, 2007; Headache, 2008)… For the artist, who has been creating work on fragmentation, erasure, and decomposition since her beginnings, the work have to be cathartic: by displaying dying, it must help us to tame it…
“The Milk of Goals” – Venice Biennale&
Central pavilion – Giardini
Calle Dietro Il Paludo, 849, Venice, Italy
Until November 27
Films to observe on www.artmuseum.pl&
Stéphanie Dulout
L’article ANETA GRZESZYKOWSKA : SIMULACRA est apparu en premier sur Galerie Joseph.
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