Maps of Memories

Magdalena Kleszyńska´s artistry is based on the comprehensive research of the human bond with time and memory. She pays attention to human stories and relates them with the already closed time of the past and experienced presence. Principal issue is empirical experience of a human who, under the influence of emotions mystifies past and interprets it into subjective memory. She opens significant question of designing personal and collective memory through preservation of stories for ourselves and future generations. By interpretation, she creates memory maps where openly recounts situational stories obtained via dialogue of their owners. She would never have experienced them without actual experience and personal long-time fascination with the subject. Distinctive name of the exhibition, Maps of Memories, is based on the author´s long-term program and residencies she attended latterly. The first one took place in Portuguese Guimarães, the second one in Pragovka Gallery at the beginning of this year. She focused there on guided conversations with gallery´s visitors, residents of Prague 9 and artistic community of Pragovka. Theme of the conversations were significant objects from their personal and family memories. By using almost psychoanalytical approach, she examined respondent´s memories and uncovered nostalgic situations from their lives and fragments of time. On top of that, she drew patterns from lost bits of a former car factory, historical resources, and archaeological collections of museums. Magdalena Kletszyńska expose collection of human stories through „objects“ that are exhibited in an raw anonymity of white gallery walls. Extracted from their natural setting and placed in a new context of gallery timelessness, they reflect relationships that we create using common objects with people and past. Grasped and transferred into the new context of gallery, they encourage a viewer to reveal transformed motifs and articulation of question. Are these objects merely artefacts representing everyday life, or do they comprise a symbolic aspect and a metaphorical side? Can objects be our guides that lead us into the past lives of their owners? Can they maintain their own subjectivity or are they a map which connect us with the previous path? Do we own them, or do they own us? The presented monumental installations and small executions considerably transmit with the architecture of the exhibition space and physical proximity of the viewer. He appears in an entangled crowd full of aluminium sheets (Beyond cycles), which evoke oblivion and fear from losing significance and own existence through the affection of a rust corroding and implementation into the environment of the First Republic factory. A person finds himself at the place that is physical but also a state of being – psychological inward marked by events, affiliation, desire but also displacement. Focal point for the works is the aesthetic of destruction in terms of growth. The artist uncovers new layers of ideas and materials by gradual transformation and archaeological process. Techniques of perforation and assemblage, present in the series Between, which are imprint of urban structures are becoming centre point. They represent places marked by time, both the real one and imaginary one – from the streets of old Prague to the sandy shores of Portugal. From industrial buildings of telecommunication warehouse to the exposition of the anthropological museum.