Memory Substance Juicing Barbie DNA with Ancestral Purification in Accelerating Decelerating Macabre

Someone proposed the timeline–to meet in the past–’86 and then in the future. Don’t remember the exact coordinates. Perception was shifting, changing, stretching, no longer able to communicate. We were still talking. Using gestures as language. Rhythmic movements of wizards producing magic and soup, in the vastness of the shared energy. All the images from witches to churches, coders, queens, mothers, cast bronze appendages, screens, tablets, phones, photo frames, clay structures, and superheroines like Xena were passing by, juicing Barbie DNA with ancestral purification in accelerating decelerating macabre. Music was repeatedly saying: respect. This time the orgasmic sensations in a shared peeing ceremony were very intense. On her phone she had an app installed with white noise. Vagina was sending signals about what’s good and what’s bad through the active process of digging, firing, shaping feminist narratives. A soup out of videos, Barbies, mythologies, mushrooms, clay, leaves and words, and pour it all on the walls. The device at the centre of the exhibition is a “Video Girl” Barbie doll. It is a 2010 special edition Barbie with a video camera and playback unit embedded in its body; a device that allows for the expression of vulnerability, humour, playfulness, and transversality. Czyżyk’s work plays with the concept of HAL–a fictional AI from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey–by proposing a reimagined, non-male version of the character in the form of Athena Barbie. Contributors from around the world received their own “Video Girl” from the artist to film their unique viewpoints, stories and personal perspectives of the times we are living in. Their contributions have been transformed from narrative single channel film into one organic piece, BOdyssey archive (2016-2022)—a memory substance.