Exhibition | Listen to the Echo | Kaja Prusinowska (POL)
We invite you to an exhibition of works by Kaja Prusinowska. Romuald Demidenko writes about the artist and her work:
And with the touch of light, water will begin to flow through plants in a pulse, move and wash their interiors, and escape from the leaf directly into the air, into the lungs of frogs, into the fur of mice, and finally, for a moment, into condensed drops of clouds. Day, night. Inhale, exhale. Water seeps through the green along the inner paths of anatomy.
— an excerpt from the book “Patyki, badyle” by Urszula Zajączkowska
The exhibition presents digitally processed images originally created as watercolours and ink-and-pencil drawings on paper, as well as works drawn with a stylus on a tablet. The expression and lightness of these works, achieved through the use of watercolours and the blurring of colour fields – including those displayed on a liquid crystal screen – lead me to call them “flowing images”. I am not entirely certain, however, whether this term fully captures their character.
Kaja Prusinowska creates covers for music albums and audio productions, as well as animations accompanying concerts and performances, including those created for the Children’s Musician Company developed together with Janusz Prusinowski. Her images are usually characterised by vivid, intense colours strongly contrasting with their often dark backgrounds. They resemble ornaments or paper cut-outs. They primarily depict the more-than-human world: plants, birds, and other animals. They bring to mind illustrations from fairy tales and old stories, and thus also a childlike way of seeing the world.
A source of inspiration for the artist can be found in childhood illustrations, book covers, and the mysterious worlds created by artists such as Jan Marcin Szancer or Tove Jansson. Another inspiration is the ornamentation of traditional culture and the associations that folk art continues to evoke: embroidery, lace, and paper cut-outs. In these forms, aesthetics intertwined with function, and decoration was an integral part of everyday life rather than an addition to it.
Prusinowska refers to this tradition while searching for connections between the visual and the auditory, creating images in which the past proves closer to the present than we often assume.
Singer, painter, ethnopedagogue, author of scripts, melodies, and stage designs, and – as she herself emphasises – a mother of five children. This self-description softens the typical language of biographical notes while reflecting the numerous singing and workshop activities that Prusinowska directs towards children. In her own words, she often returns to childhood: as long as she can remember, she has enjoyed drawing, painting, and singing. Her first musical education came from her grandmother, who often sang, preserving memories of songs from different eras, performed in several languages and dialects.
Like many drawings, these works rely on the importance of the handmade mark, the trace of creation, and a certain degree of imperfection – a conscious artistic choice. Folklore, present both in her musical interests and in her visual language, is not a story about the past, but a living carrier of knowledge about a multi-world. The titles of songs and their meanings lead us towards the deep symbolism of connections between humans and the plant-and-animal world, or rather the more-than-human environment.
Prusinowska is not only an illustrator but also a researcher, explorer, and storyteller of multiculturalism. Her work concerns multiplicity and often the difficult-to-tell microhistories of regions whose traditions have intersected while remaining distinct. Through her work, she offers insight into the many realities from which we come, using ethnographic knowledge and showing that our roots are not only about origins but also about ways of understanding the world.
This turn towards tradition is therefore not a return to what has passed, but an attempt to look towards natureculture – a diverse alliance of plants and animals, a many-family being whose continuity depends on what is passed on from previous generations.
Just as plants do not function merely as landscape elements in Kaja Prusinowska’s work, animals also become part of a world of relationships from which humans have never been separate. Birds, horses, dogs, hares, and roosters introduce layered narratives rooted in old songs and folk imagination. The artist evokes a reality in which animals lived close to people, often sharing the same spaces of everyday life.
In the context of the climate crisis, Prusinowska’s works can be read both as records of disappearing relationships and as songs of hope.
— Romuald Demidenko
Romuald Demidenko – curator, art historian, and occasional writer. He is interested in representation, accessibility, and relationships between art, environmental humanities, and otherness. Since 2008, he has realised exhibitions, public programmes, and publications in various formats, most recently at the Baltic Gallery of Contemporary Art in Słupsk and Ustka. He is a member of the International Association of Art Critics – AICA.
Details
When: August 21–23, 9:00-17:00
Where: Workshops of Culture, Grodzka 7, entrance gate
Admission free
