When I started thinking about this exhibition, I wanted it to be interesting for the viewer, not to be overloaded, overstuffed, but nevertheless an intriguing puzzle for whoever comes to see it. Hence my decision to choose Kama Sokolnicka, because I wanted to avoid an exhibition that was overly clear, homogeneous and did not evoke the need to return.
For Kama, the language is important. She cares about the form of what she wants to convey. She gives her works titles that do not go unnoticed—"Jet lag", "Poor View From Here Also" or "Exercises in seeing". They are often the ones that help to reach for the initially non-obvious contexts in the margins of the stories she collects. They also serve to build a connection between Kama's works and what we know from art history, political thought or psychoanalysis. The paintings themselves come to our aid, annexing elements of our reality, including the non-artistic one hidden very deeply within each of us.
“One results from the other” is the artist's thoughtful and nuanced story also about what concerns people. It is difficult to find one dominant medium in the exhibition: there are paintings, collages and objects. It is their rhythm that gives proportion to its successive parts. In one of her collages, Kama depicts a girl lying in a gymnastics outfit; above her on black paper, there is a tower made up of simple geometric signs. On another, a visual fragment from the poem “Religion” by Anatol Stern, the creator of the Polish Futurist manifesto, appears against a background of a flock of sheep. For Kama Sokolnicka, the meanings converge at a single point—they are traces of human activity filtered through the language of visual arts. It becomes a kind of access code, a pretext for combing through archives, maintaining a perpetual desire to discover the unknown.
For Kama, art is something like an erudite experience; it is an ever-recurring question mark, a questioning of established patterns and a constant search for something overviewed in the past and present. She pulls several threads in her narratives, which are based on inquiries into medicine, psychoanalysis or culture studies. She introduces characters, sentences, stories, complex scientific research, which she consciously allows to unfold in the viewer's mind. Once it is the story of the five poisoned arrows destined for the Buddha, another time it is the inquiries of medicine about dreaming and nocturnal fantasies. And it's a bit like life here, onne results from the other...