Since 2018, Joanna Lesnierowska and a group of her friends artists have been working on the next installment of her series “Exercises in Looking” initiated in 2014 with the trio “…(rooms by the sea)” and continued in 2017 with the solo “blur”.
Developing for nearly a decade at the intersection of visual and performing arts – the practice of perceiving and thinking with (moving) images – draws inspiration and strategies from contemporary painting and (post)photography and seeking visual and physical representation for those emotional states that slip words and unambiguous framing. The process, constantly dialoguing and improvising with existing realities, many times has not had a chance to culminate due to the pandemic and is still evolving in search of its own (and possible) form. Marked by successive turns of (personal and global) action, it has undergone so many transformations that on its way it has already crossed the territory of several fields of art, practices and genres.
Apparently, in order to understand the world, one must first see, remember and recreate its image. We look therefore as if through an “open window” (finestra aperta) of an image. And if, as photographer Jeff Wall argues, art cannot change the world, we believe along with him that it can change us – the beholders – those who look (and act) – and our relationship with the world. It is for this reason that we insist on continuing.
Disintegration of the world as we knew it,
and alignment with it,
dictates the rhythm and shape(s) of the way.
What there is appears only as a fragment –
the tip of a drifting iceberg –
whose monstrous mass (and history)
irrevocably disappears under the water
or
like a stranded marine mammal,
it rocks and sinks into the sand
revealing less and less of itself.
Though at once it seems to move again.
What reveals its form today,
in a moment irrevocably it loses
and its final shape
still remains a riddle-like mystery
whose solution will turn out to be as complex and vague
as the process leading to it.
In fascination we witness the ongoing flow of
images, sounds, and events,
aware
that we’ve already long passed the moment
when we can turn back
At the same time we cannot get rid of impression
that we’re spinning in circles. Or maybe, we stand still.
