Womens Art, Iwona Lemke-Konart

opening: 5/04/2019 7-9 PM

exhibtition: 6/04-15/06/2019

‘Women’s art’ is the exhibition of Iwona Lemke-Konart, a performance artist, filmmaker, author and conceptual artist active in the 1970s and 1980s. Despite her intensive activity at that time, as both an artist and an organizer of numerous events (exhibitions at Galeria S, which she operated in Toruń, lectures and symposia), in most studies of Polish art of those decades her work is entirely ignored. As Wiktoria Szczupacka writes in her text for this exhibition, “It may be said that this is a story like many others of a woman artist erased from the history of the patriarchal avant-garde, but it is also possible to take a different perspective and note the characteristic use Lemke-Konart made of the position of a young female artist.” In essence, even at the time of her early student debut Lemke-Konart displayed a critical stance toward the general situation in force in the Polish art world, and in her work undertook a polemic with that situation. Lemke-Konart also posed more universal questions on the condition of contemporary humanity, and in particular questions about the agency of women, their relation to the world, their relation to their own physicality, imagination and image, as expressed for example in the mail-art project Women’s Art, made up of numerous self-portraits—vestiges of on-camera performance works. Another work presented in the exhibition is The Limits of Human Abilities, a multimedia composition of sketches, photographs, writings, and video recordings. Assuming the required poses, reminiscent of the asanas in yoga, the artist marked them with a series of lines on the wall, thus forming a sketch of mountain peaks. An analytical approach was contrasted with the possibilities of the human body, and the totality was captured with the distance characteristic of the artist—or what Szczupacka calls a “wink of the eye.”