A Part for the Whole

Curatorial text:

„Ancient orators used ‘pars pro toto’ (part for the whole) to replace the names of objects, phenomena and concepts with a fragment thereof. This figure of speech was intended to draw attention emphatically to the subject they were describing. The Bible teaches: let anyone with ears listen; though we know that to hear, we need more than one sense. A close examination of fragments allows us to discern the state of the whole organism.

We encourage you to peer into the crevice, into the black hole, into the filth from which we avert our eyes. We invite you to look at the processes still unfolding beyond us (and within us) and to celebrate what remains after them. Look at the structures, artefacts, and maladies of objects that aspire to describe the entire world.

Jolanta Brach-Czaina says: those who explore the fringes and the matter emerging from them represent a fearless society of plenty or, on the contrary, a civilisation that is utterly exhausted, seeking new frontiers. Karina Marusińska’s ceramics are useless, unappetising, deliberately repulsive. They resemble what we would secretly like to get rid of, expel, from which we need to free ourselves. But we are all familiar with this, after all – from laboratory photographs, from tiny cameras inserted through openings into the human body, from homes. From caves, corridors and tunnels. From journeys to the centre of the Earth.”

Michał Grzegorzek i Dominika Drozdowska