CUT I Emilia Kina & Radek Szlęzak
Foundation Piana Gllery I 18.06 – 20.07.2023
curator: Filip Rybkowski
Cutting can be brutal and radical in its very gesture, but it can also be an expression of care or an ordering procedure that helps us better find ourselves in the reality around us. The act of cutting can thus be both the result of an executioner and a tender gardener. Despite this ambiguity, we can be sure of one thing: the effect of cutting will always be something truncated and incomplete. This fragment always relates us to an earlier – real or supposed – whole.
The exhibition presents the latest realizations of Emilia Kina and Radek Szlęzak. Their works take up themes related to the scenic nature of the image, seemingly only stopping the course of events in its frame. They refer to both fragmentation, destruction and ordering – pruning. The cinematic procedure of cutting (English: “cut”, German: “Schnitt”), separating shots or scenes from each other, becomes for Emilia and Radek a pretext for a story about montage taking place in the image and space of the exhibition.
It can be assumed that all the works we see in the exhibition have their heroes and heroines; all of them are also a record, trace or effect of certain actions. These actions take place both within the visible – eyewitness and imaginary course of events. The heroes and heroines may be fictional, historical or even based on shreds of scattered biographies. Within the exhibition, however, they become primarily the viewers, who, through their physical presence in the space, multiply in numerous reflections, but also stop in front of a solid wall of compactly laid bricks. Now they must play their roles between the real architecture and the illusion created in the image – condemned to move on the edge, which is not always as sharp as a crumb of a shattered mirror.