Leave it

2006,

Centre for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw

The exhibition Leave it is a meditation about memory and the way it permeates and burdens contemporary urban, social and symbolic spaces. And about the desire to finally find one's own place in this space, 'here'.

Some parts of Poland are so steeped in memory, usually traumatic and tragic, that life has usually been squeezed out of them and they are suffocated. Heavy, traumatic past makes contemporary life difficult, blocks breathing. Polish-Jewish representations constitute the backbone and the main reference point of this exhibition. Still entangled in the past, they need to be constantly and constructively reworked. Young people from Israel who visit our country perceive it as a cemetery. The elders simply remember it in this way. It is hard to build on such a fundament any positive relation.

Between uncritical glorification and desire to forget, however, there is no big difference. Both aim at building the world devoid of doubt, the world in which everything is 'cool'. The project Leave it says that it is not cool at all. Rajkowska works on memory neither to liberate from it nor to praise it. Rather, she is driven at accustoming with it in order to make possible present activity and communication. She wants to live within the memory, but not for the sake of it. And she wants us to learn how to breath with it as if with the air.

The show is composed of one installation in the public space and a few situations inscribed in the space of a gallery (in Warsaw: the CCA Ujazdowski Castle). It is of a non-linear and non-traditional nature. Its elements are dispersed in order to performatively act out the rhisomatic mechanism of how memory works. Intervening at those places loaded with memory, the artist wants to modify their context, to transform their energy. She wants to leave an altered message that would cause people forget their obvious, automatic roles ("tourist", "inhabitant", "anti-Semite", "stranger") and face each other the way they really are, just like this.

Magda Pustoła