Activities on homes

Aleksandra Kubiak's exhibition Activities on Houses focuses on the concept of home, understood not only as a physical space, but also as an emotional state, community, memory and body. The artist explores how the house is constructed through everyday experiences such as cuddling, warmth, the rhythm of rocking or building relationships. These concepts, intertwined with the categories of knowledge and architecture, form a map of intimate meanings in which the private meets the social and the political. A film prepared especially for the Poznań exhibition entitled House to Carry is an attempt to capture what is transmitted not only through stories, but also through the body, emotions and gestures.

Kubiak builds his house through gestures of reduction, not accumulation. A moving house can only contain what, in essence, creates the idea of a home. In the new film, the artist considers what a home is as a physical, emotional and genetic space; she shows how we carry it inside us, even when we can no longer build it. It is also a film of the road, a record of a hike, a time of fatigue, a slow traverse of the landscape, the effort it takes to push a heavy object, symbolizing a house, from the studio in Zielona Góra to the Gallery in Poznań. This seemingly irrational gesture restores meaning to everything that has lost its value in today's culture of speed. This action is somewhere between fantasy and reality. It is the materialization of the dream of one's own place, but at the same time it reminds that this place can be lost, abandoned, moved. A house can be built, but it can also be lost. You can not have it, you can remember it, you can try to take it with you. So it is not surprising that the wandering artist was perceived by the people she met along the way as a homeless and crazy person. Effort here does not lead to the goal in the simplest sense. It itself becomes a meaning. The time needed to cross the road, the weight of the object, the fatigue of the body - all this is an integral part of the artistic activity. The house is no longer a picture. It is a weight that must be carried, pulled or pushed in front of you.

The focal point of the exhibition, the Moving House.1—64 consists of sixty-four small plaster bricks placed on a wooden pallet. Bricks become the imaginary building block of a private space, a house that can be folded, unfolded and taken with you. The importance of the exhibition Actions on Homes balances between the private and the public, between the gesture of care and the need to belong. It is an attempt to understand the house as a dynamic, fragile structure that we constantly build within ourselves, among ourselves and in front of the world.

An integral part of the exhibition is the accompanying publication of texts written by the artist for years, which are created together with her subsequent realizations. The author decided to collect them in one publication, although from the beginning they were not intended exclusively for reading. They were also to be listened to during the performances performed by the artist. Written in the first person, they suggest a record of confession, an internal monologue that allows the author to determine her own place in the world, gather strength, put thoughts in order. It is a record extremely direct, realistic, devoid of literary coquetry, and at the same time powerful precisely because of its uncompromising energy. These texts are multi-layered, but they never become vague. Their strength comes from the precision of observation of both reality and their own emotional states. They can be read as a stream of consciousness: a string of thoughts, recalled images, memories, suddenly appearing associations. Kubiak's lyrics are not just a record of personal experience. Like the whole exhibition, they become a space where the private meets what is common: memory, experience, anxiety, body, family, history and the need for closeness. It is also an exhibition about the search for roots, a return to family microhistories, to the dramatic experiences of the past that have an impact on subsequent generations.

Actions on houses therefore do not propose the image of the house as a stable order. The house is rather a question here. Something we try to build, move, recover, sometimes just imagine. Perhaps that is why its most important form turns out to be movement: the way, the body, the voice, the memory and the work done despite the absence of a practical reason. Home doesn't have to be a place to go back to. Sometimes it's what we carry with us.

curator: Marek Wasilewski

Co-financed from the funds of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage from the Culture Promotion Fund — a state special purpose fund