CON­TEXTS Gab­rie­la Wa­rzyc­ka-Tu­tak 3 XII 2015 – 31 XII 2015 Żak Art Gal­lery in Gdańsk TEXT Małgorzata Zofia Wesołowska

The elab­or­ate pho­to­graphs by Gab­rie­la Wa­rzyc­ka-Tu­tak re­volve around the theme of the human body situ­ated in a visual con­text that is dif­fer­ent from the nat­ural. Her black and white square com­pos­i­tion fea­tur­ing care­fully elab­or­ated chiaroscuro bring to mind X-ray film, they evoke the smell of a hos­pital, or per­haps a dis­sect­ing room. Gab­rie­la un­dresses the body, or rather bod­ies, not only by por­tray­ing them naked, but even math­em­at­ic­ally fac­tor­ised. In order to de­scribe the cli­mate of these im­ages in a more rad­ical way, one might ven­ture a com­par­ison with dis­mant­ling the car­cass, which con­sists in di­vid­ing meat into se­lec­ted frag­ments.

The ef­fect of mul­ti­plic­a­tion, the cre­ation of a mul­ti­pli­city of mu­tu­ally un­con­nec­ted frag­ments amp­li­fies the butcher’s shop con­nota­tion pro­duced by the vit­rine dis­play of an ob­ject on a plastic tray, per­versely packed in plastic foil, well chilled. The pho­to­graphs em­an­ate a dis­sect­ing room cold­ness. Light is cold, even dark­ness is cold; cold is the man­ner of the labor­at­ory-like, luck­ily only di­gital, frag­ment­a­tion of the body/bod­ies into parts and or­gans, the tex­tures, sur­faces and ob­jects that com­ple­ment the com­pos­i­tion are cold as well: por­cel­ain, metal, wire, trans­lu­cent plastic mass, white silk or poly­es­ter.

It is not a play with the body; the pho­to­graphs have an air of ser­i­ous­ness and ice-cold dram­at­ism of the situ­ation after, the mys­tery of dis­in­teg­ra­tion as op­posed to the con­sist­ency en­sured by faith in the soul or in­teg­ral­ity.

The dis­in­teg­rated bod­ies from the cycle Con­texts not only gave up the ghost, but even lost their in­teg­ral­ity, in which we nev­er­the­less be­lieve when we are ex­amined by a doc­tor. Here, we are sub­jec­ted to a care­ful ex­am­in­a­tion by tech­ni­cians whom we sel­dom en­counter in real­ity, but whose ex­ist­ence we real­ise: dental tech­ni­cian, dia­gnostic tech­ni­cian, X-ray tech­ni­cian, in­stru­ment­ing nurse. We do not en­counter them (in most cases, and sel­dom when we are fully con­scious), but they en­counter us on a macro scale, view­ing us in frag­ments.

To a large ex­tent this is the very man­ner in which the eponym­ous Con­texts can be read: the body in com­pletely un­nat­ural sur­round­ings, which de­lib­er­ately dis­or­i­ent­ate the viewer. The para­dox of the med­ical con­text of this logic con­sists in the fact that the ob­ject­ive of the labor­at­ory pre­ci­sion of dia­gnostics is a re­in­teg­ra­tion of the body (heal­ing), and there­fore guid­ance (nav­ig­a­tion), and not dis­or­i­ent­a­tion.

Hos­pital and labor­at­ory in­teri­ors, dis­sect­ing room con­texts, the dis­in­teg­rated body, dec­or­ated with wire or held to­gether with a metal clamp, dried with a cloth, X-rayed, sub­jec­ted to view­ing from all sides, have led the artist to an­other phase in life, in which she seems to be on the lookout for a spir­itual or psychic factor that would pos­sess the power to in­teg­rate.

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