Membrane 5 — Kamil Kak

Membrane 5(A) and 5(B)
Center of Polish Sculpture (Orońsko, Poland)
10th Youth Triennial
June–September 2023

Membrane 5(A) (2023)

Since the beginning of the full-scale stage of the Russian invasion, one of Poland's popular opposition newspapers has published nearly fourteen thousand articles describing the Ukrainian situation from a Polish perspective. Each, with an average of thirty entries per day, contains a broad cross-section of visual material published in the Polish media - from stock photos symbolically referring to the situation described, through reports from street protests, to photographs from the front lines. Drawings based on press photographs embroidered on a velvet guidon expose often biased and stereotypical representations of Polish-Ukrainian relations present in Polish media. Motifs focus on the interactions between the two nations during the past several months, both acts of solidarity and compassion and bittersweet situations requiring a firm response.

Membrane 5(B) (2023)

/casted aluminum and bronze, ceramics, climbing lines/
The second part of the installation is a chain made of links deconstructing the schematic reception of the passport stamp. From the artist's subconscious emerges a lightly sketched, agonizingly elongated, idealistic, and utopian picture of the world where the boundaries between nations and viewpoints blur. The vision of reality perceived through the lens of media noise distorts and surrealizes the incoming stimuli. The colorful, uneven, and spilled shapes refer to stamps used to pass us through the boundaries of the collective subconscious. The chain becomes an alternative to Europe's tightening immigration restrictions, which – hard-set and framed in the shapes of formalized state seals imprinted in passports – can easily block an individual's onward journey. The chain represents lighter – and thus still shaping – alternative approaches for dealing with the complexity of both political and border situations. The chain signals inevitable changes in social structures not only in Ukraine or Poland but worldwide. (Text by Ewa Szatybełko)