A passageway lined with torn newsprint prospects into an odd capsule of an exhibition room. In it, a huge ribbon of tropical mahogany tumbles down a wall small freestanding sculptures in concrete symbolize crude seating. Pages from newspapers in Polish, German, French, Czech, and English are collaged on a paravent, a suspended body, and directly on a wall and ground. Thick pipes and fluorescent lights trace the gleaming white room’s higher perimeter, evoking the eerie sterility of a ’60s sci-fi movie.
In this uncanny circumstance, Polish artist Renata Rara Kaminska explores liberty of speech and the press—and in this context, the exhibition by itself is a danger: Given that the much-proper Law and Justice get together (PiS) gained manage of Poland’s federal government in 2015, multiple Polish art institutions have knowledgeable “interventions” in the kind of dismissed museum administrators in journalism and artwork, censorship and self-censorship are ongoing.
Exhibiting in a German-owned setting up, the Berlin-primarily based artist daringly invitations viewers to think about not only who can categorical what (the spectacular wooden sculptures, designed from archived imported material, allude to Germany’s present, overdue colonial discourses) but also news as a generator of memory: In the collages, modern headlines and stories come to be a kaleidoscope of European Union rupture. The artist also appears to be like further more back: For 1609, 2022, she ripped enlarged copies of a web site from the extremely 1st newspaper to supply glimpses by means of the passageway home windows they conceal. In November 1953, 2022, an intact 1953 edition of the GDR’s socialist organ Neues Deutschland hangs on a metal frame Kaminska pilfered from East Germany’s former parliament constructing right before it was demolished. Its tales provide spin on spies, postwar production, and American tanks. Alternatively than elegize the freedoms prolonged affiliated with the fourth estate, Kaminska exposes revealed info as the malleable medium that it has generally been, and encourages contemplation on the world’s increasingly fragile buildings of reality-generating.
— Kimberly Bradley