"Clotho" by anastazja Palczukiewicz

01.12.2024-28.02.2025

Focusing on identity issues, the artist turns to the history and fate of Western Belarus, whose territory in different historical periods was part of various state entities: the Russian Empire, Poland, and the USSR.

This diversity of political and cultural contexts has left a deep mark on the identity of its inhabitants. The artist builds her speculative view of identity and home by exploring historical archives and memoirs of people whose lives were connected with the fate of Western Belarus but whose identity remains unspoken, not expressed due to various social, political, or cultural reasons. Where life in the context of a clash of cultures, a mixture of traditions, family histories, and social experience contributes to internal contradictions and the inability to define oneself through belonging to something evident and unchangeable.
Looking at the conflicts that arise in the modern world (Ukraine and the Post-Soviet space, Abkhazia, Ossetia, Artsakh, Transnistriam), we see how the issues of colonialism and national borders contradict and do not coincide with the real boundaries of life on earth. Thus, they are unavoidably doomed to clash and conflict. State-building is carried out there in such formats that, perhaps, the best individual way is an “exit”, being fluid all the time and formulating a so-called liquid identity.

Turning to the ideas of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman about “liquid identity”, the artist considers the concept of home and the inability to find it not as a tragedy or an obstacle but as an advantage. In this way, we get rid of inclusion in the national framework, which is a priori based on the ideas of right-wing discourse. Here, the question arises: To what extent is finding a home the ultimate goal of self-identification, or is this place that people are looking for unattainable?
The project is presented as an installation, where one of the main objects is the engraving Lida, Church. (1918) by the German military artist Paul Paeschke. The second part of the installation is a series of sculptures in which the artist focuses on working with metal as a material capable of melting and joining. The seam structure becomes the basis of sculptural forms and represents a line connecting the edges and the unfilled space, where the interval of the filled gap becomes the scar line and exists as an artifact, a consequence of the impact of the force that created the gap, separation.