From Where You Stand

Gabriela Warzycka-Tutak

Melting the Body

Where I stand, the legs resting against the tree rise into the air. The eyes, now looking from a different perspective, take in the new image. As the natural direction of gravity has been reversed, the lens of everyday life becomes another layer of vision. After a few seconds, the brain learns the new position. You begin to observe.

The gaze is drawn into the scene, focusing on the story and emotions, in a soft and malleable light. We have a different sense of participation.

One shouldn’t remain in this position for too long. But one may practise: teaching the body to dissolve into micro-gestures; teaching the gaze to penetrate the second, third and subsequent planes of the image.

Sensitivity matures through encounter.

Like in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, where we read that a person is not born complete, but matures through experience, and the meaning of life is discovered gradually rather than all at once. 

I’d like to view art and its interpretation in a similar way: as a process of expanding sensitivity, developing openness and enriching experience.

Not everything has to have meaning.  

Understanding is born from experience and reflection. We can create images that record moments of time, invite conversation and quietly permeate our consciousness.

The third place^[1] allows us to open up to this experience. Shedding patterns and abandoning rules of the game, we meet over coffee.

A coffee to remember, with a hint of tabasco, where different worlds meet in a single smoky aroma.

The fish in the aquarium, just beside the armchair, walk through the water along their pre-planned routes. At times, they decide on a spontaneous change of course.

Or the experience of space where conversations are dropped and where you “just do nothing all day long but eat splendid food and lie in the shade beneath such a magnificent, broad-limber chestnut tree […]”^[2].

From Where You Stand is a story of a shift in perspective. The exhibition leads the viewer through everyday spaces and seemingly ordinary situations, pausing over gestures, light and moments that usually go unnoticed. This is a story about looking – attentive, tender and open to other people and their stories,  in a modernist interior from the 1960s that used to witness encounters and lively conversations.

The presented works have emerged from the artists’ prosaic relationships with space. The exhibition unfolds across two locations of the Gdańsk Centre for Contemporary Art, where the history of the former modernist Marysieńka Café subtly intertwines with modern art.

This is a story of the memory of space: the story of the roots and individual perspectives of the artists.  

^[1] The term “third place”, introduced by Ray Oldenburg, refers to communal social spaces distinct from the home and the workplace.

^[2] Robert Walser, The Assistant, translated by Susan Bernofsky, Penguin Books 2008.