Something Is No Yes - Monika Drożyńska Exhibition

No Yes. Something isn’t right. There’s a lack.

And the gallery tale, written out in three rooms, 16 embroideries in black thread on white, one in white on white, two videos and two installations in fabric, is about nothing other than lack. About a lack of provisions of appropriate amount of support. About non-compliance with norms of liberal democracy. About the omission of women in narratives of the pasts and presents. Ultimately, about deficiencies of language, of words, which are always too few to describe the current time. It is also, perhaps, an exhibition about everything that it is, finally, missing. Or else, it is the lack in itself.

Since, initially, it was meant to be a story about something else. For example, about Halina and Daniela, the artist’s aunt and grandmother, who took care of her, when she was little. Presently, Halina takes care of Daniela, offering her love, which is hard to be wrapped in pink cellophane, definitely not easy to sell. Whereas the system employs such love to make savings and to fill its own holes with it. Such a devotion is a daily, often painstaking, activity of numerous women, like a kind of feeling which needs to exist, because it saves another human being. It would have, thus, been an exhibition about an incessant necessity of taking care of others. But also of oneself. One’s son. The aunt. The grandmother. Flowers in the living room. One’s social position. One’s rights. Memory of other women. Hence, next to Halina and Daniela, female friends of: Wałęsa, Piłsudski, Jesus, Matejko, would have appeared. Those who took care of great men would have been revoked from oblivion by lists of embroidered names. The names, in turn, would have simply been accompanied by words. Deconstructed and composed into streams, a poetic free-style. Where Monika Drożyńska would reveal herself as a (female) rapper-embroiderer – MC MD – exploding the patriarchal system or spelling out undemocratic manoeuvers of (Polish) state and local authorities.

Yes, all those things was this exhibition meant to be about and all of them will indeed be featured there. Nonetheless, it will not be about them. Its fragments, juxtaposed, interwoven and stitched together have revealed one principal connection. One whole. The lack of. The mother. Support. Memory. Authorities’ ethics (power ethic).

Quite simply, an utter lack of a sense of security, such that it can be felt as deep as the gut.

Well, all in all, our world isn’t really right, isn’t it? No no?

- Kamil Kuitkowski

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SOMETHING IS NO YES

MONIKA DROŻYŃSKA

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Curator: KAMIL KUITKOWSKI

Opening: Saturday, 16 March, 19:00

Exhibition open: 17.03 - 01.04

Galeria Szara Kamienica, Rynek Główny 6, Krakow

Galeria Szara Kamienica Opening Hours

Tue-Fri: 13:00-18:00

Sat-Sun: 12:00-16:00

The exhibition has been organised in collaboration with the Exhibition Bureau / Polish Modern Art Foundation.