Za’opatrzenie

2023

Installation, actionism

The word "zaopatrzenie" can be roughly translated from Polish as "supply", but "opatrzenie" means patching, cleansing it of something, filling it, performing a sacrament over a dying person.

The Giants project began for me a year ago as a series of large-scale sculptures in which I wanted to transfer my painting into three-dimensional space, to create a "body" for it. This long-term project started as a broad anthropological gesture, symbolizing the presence of man in the world as such, but over time it acquired a much deeper meaning and became an impulse to understand my own identity and my role in art. While working on the project, I abandoned the idea of myself as a universal person and an abstract citizen of the world, tracing my path of alienation from my native Belarusian background to the fact that I am its contemporary representative. The sculptures, on the other hand, have become a kind of blank canvas, ready to accept the diversity of traditions and histories. Every culture and nationality can be inside these works — I am creating a sarcophagus, empty and ready to be filled with any stuffing. The reason for continuing the series was to realize the uniqueness of the background, my own and unique. Each of us has a personal baggage of cultural codes, historical experiences and economic conditions. The contents of this "suitcase" remain a mystery. But the fact that this baggage exists has great significance to me. I brought the project to completion because of the personal territory I entered: the sculptures became an embodiment of the presence of my culture.

The context of returning or taking the "Giants" sculptures back to nature, to the natural environment, was originally part of and one of the reasons for the creation of the works, after being realized in the action Za'opatrzenie. The works also personify a person connected to the land. He grew up on this land, belongs to it and will eventually return to it.  The bedding used as the main material — sheets, duvet covers and pillowcases play the role of an element of inevitable oblivion. Old branches found near the Vistula River, plaster and bedding collected from various places become part of a massive object that undergoes a natural process of decay and decomposition, similar to the human life cycle. It is important to me that my sculptures return to the earth, dissolve into it and become part of it again. The last available works in the series have been returned to the site where branches that are integrated into the fabric of the sculptures have been collected — they have taken root in the park above the Vistula River.