Basia Bânda Half-sleep

Curator: Ada Kusiak

What does the night look like when sleep does not come? The eponymous half-sleep is the moment when the body demands rest and the mind is persistently in tension. It's an unbearable state of suspense that we fall into after many sleepless nights — when the line between wakefulness and sleep becomes blurred.

Has the dream already occurred or is the wakefulness still ongoing? The apparent wakefulness may in fact be sleep, which, however, does not give rest. Half-sleep is tiring, exhausting, disorienting. It makes the thought of the approaching night a cause for anxiety — this in turn effectively drives away the dream, making a vicious circle.

Basa Bańda's solo exhibition takes up the theme of insomnia as an experience that is dark, disturbing and elusive to logical descriptions. The exhibition presenting the latest works of the artist is an invitation to observe this ephemeral, peculiar place between worlds. The paintings, embroideries and objects shown in the exhibition are traces of sleepless nights and a record of what Basia began to experience regularly since March 2024 - when she could not fall asleep again after waking up prematurely.

The artist devoted the first part of the exhibition to the individual perspective and personal history of sleepless nights. Personal experience led her to explore the topic in depth and try to capture the problem also in a universal dimension. The second part of the exhibition deals with the common causes of insomnia and ways to deal with it. For many months, the artist studied dream books, extracting from them seemingly small, but not obvious information. Taken together, they create an image of sleep as a much more complex phenomenon — involving the body, psyche and biological processes (not just human).

Quotations from the publication were used as extremely accurate titles of works. They are so explicit, triggering associations and facilitating the deciphering of non-figurative works that additional descriptions become redundant. Some of them, sounding like excerpts from a biology textbook, objectively describe sleep as a series of tiny, physiological processes. Next to scientific phrases, the language of everyday life appears, which with its literality demolishes the seriousness of earlier descriptions. Putting together apparent adversities is a common practice of Basa, also used — and perhaps most of all — in her visual utterances. In the images there is a tension between what is soft and melting and what is clear and hard. Pink, present in the works of the artist for a long time, this time does not refer to the corporeal or erotic. Although we still stay in the bedroom — this space becomes primarily a place of night wakefulness. Pastel colors and fuzzy forms evoke a dreamy suspension, flowing consciousness. Against their background, however, there appear precisely painted figures — strong elements, disturbing this subtle matter and focusing attention on themselves like an intrusive thought that prevents us from falling asleep. In this tension between draining and persistent presence, the essence of half-sleep is revealed.

Basia Bańda was born in 1980 in Zielona Góra. In 2001-2006 she studied at the Faculty of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań. In 2018, she won a PhD at the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice. Her works can be found in many public and private collections, including: the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, the National Museum in Gdańsk, the National Museum in Poznań, the Art Bunker in Krakow, the Centre for Polish Sculpture in Orońsko and the ING Polish Art Foundation. The artist is represented by the Monopol Gallery. Every day he lives, creates, sleeps/does not sleep/half-sleep in Zielona Góra and Przysieka.