Digital print on faience plates, performance

In my work, I continue to delve into the kitchen topic as a manifestation of the matter certain sides of which always remain in the shadows within Christian culture, either because of their dirtiness and obscenity or because of their sacredness.

I created a series of images and lined them up in a certain sequence, taking into account both the parity of large and small plates and the parity of reality split into "low" and "high". In such a way, I perceive a weekly re-enactment of the ritual of festive food consumption as a historical ancestral landscape, where each solemn place is marked by an appropriate image.

Slogans (The series of works on paper)

Human life is often compared to a road subdivided into stages. Various situations in life, meanwhile, are usually regulated by so-called formats that dictate expectations and behaviors. This “formatting” occurs with mutual consent: authorities, the market or customs may define humankind’s lifestyle, and yet each person modulates his or her principles depending on what’s expected of him or her. In any case, people willingly perform a range of tasks, “for better, for worse,” at work and during their free time.

Internal Affairs (Potocki Palace and the Iohan Georg Pinzel Museum of Sculpture)

Digital photo (a combination of photos from the restaurant's kitchen and photos re-shot from the family's 1957 archival cookbook Polish Cuisine)

The processes that normally take place in the kitchen make a sequence of acts, where the raw cooking material goes through cutting-slashing-separating and finally appears in a fundamentally different quality.

Series of paintings

Discerning the outlines of a familiar childhood item under the museum glass, one cannot help but be surprised and subsequently jealous of an external narrative that sort of steals one’s private memories. However, these feelings somehow immediately turn into stiff boredom, as the signs of intimate history get drained, neutralised, and start collecting dust under the common gaze. The so-called release of memories has an inherent flavour of the aftertaste of villainy: an object from a family home or a sign from a den of secret memories is forcefully taken, displayed for public view, or renamed.

Series of paintings, works on paper, special object

When I look at Ralko’s works from The Quiet Zone series, what comes to mind is the words “the Institute of Nutrition.” In this series, Vlada seems to address values and the kitchen as the site of blood and a women’s site, a kitchen as a locus of materiality and flesh. It is more than likely that it had nothing to do with “the Institute of Nutrition” until I saw it (although who knows). And now I cannot unsee the “institute.” When I first heard this term as a child, I saw no other possible explanation for it than that it’s an institution where they teach how to eat people. (Larysa Venediktova)

The Phantom of Liberty* (One’s Own, Mine, Alien, Shared, Free)

I call to the mysterious one who yet

Shall walk the wet sands by the edge of the stream

And look most like me, being indeed my double,

And prove of all imaginable things

The most unlike, being my anti-self.

(William Butler Yeats)

Series of 23 works on paper

Both work and the church regulate and structure bodies, lending physical organs purpose. Wherever the Custom retains its influence, simple physical toil functionally acquires a sacred dimension. It is instated through a seemingly “natural” assignment of roles: the man automatically has power over the woman simply because he’s physically stronger, the healthy survive while the weak perish, etc.

A series of works on paper

Reserve* (2017)

RESERVE. IDEA

«The following video contains violence. We need to process it prior to broadcast.»

(from a TV news segment)

Lately, I’ve been plagued by the feeling that the overall panorama of contemporary life crumbles because some fragments of it are always being concealed from us. Inconvenient or superfluous elements are excised from our quotidian existence, making the present-day reality split and slip into repetitions.

Contact line* (with Volodymyr Budnikov). Paintings, works on paper

LINE OF CONTACT (BETWEEN THE SELF AND THE SELFSAME)

For the last three years, our attention has been riveted to the so-called “line of contact.” In the early days of the hostilities in the East, the line was ostensibly justified by the logic of separating “what is ours” from “what is alien”. It has since spread, turning from a line into a surface.