What's on display here? When she speaks, you can't see the words

Lecture by Dr. Malina Barcikowska referring to the exhibition “The Word Embodied”

The authors of women's anti-utopias (Atwood, Lessing) wondered what it could be for women to write at a time of necessity to survive. What role in reality, which forces one to say goodbye to one's old self, can language play, and how the very ability to speak words is bound up with freedom and power. The artists whose works we can see in the exhibition “The Word Embodied”, say. They weave words, subject language to critical analysis, challenge, manifest, criticize, freely choose their way of expression. In fact, the arts are building a new community, the oikos.

The male cogito, which is highly valued in culture, is by nature reflective, that is, internalized, while what is feminine is associated with space — throwing emotions outside, and therefore more with what is public than with what is private. As such, a woman is best heard from the beginning when she screams and seen when she cries, and it is these unstoppable emotions that make her present. Is consent to speak from the position of a conscious word a condition for the autonomy of female expression?

Referring primarily to psychoanalysis, I would like to reflect on whether acceptance of otherness, affection, lack and identification with values marginalized in patriarchal culture is a prerequisite for the empowerment of women and whether the communication strategies and alternative language rules proposed by them have a chance to include someone else in the community thus built? Or should we rather agree on the disproportionality of the two worlds — the feminine and the masculine, which by design, I can no longer understand. I would like to try to look at the message of the exhibition from both perspectives — both male and female — writes Malina Barcikowska, PhD

Malina Barcikowska, PhD, a graduate of Philosophy at UMK and the School of Social Sciences at the IfIS PAN in Warsaw. Associated with the Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences at the University of Applied Sciences in Toruń and the Magdalena Abakanowicz University of Arts in Poznań. Art critic.

Event accompanying the exhibition “The Word Embodied”.

Co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.