Joanna Rajkowska
artist statement

I work in public space. My projects are usually set in places that are burdened with past traumas, of where social or ethnic antagonisms are present. I do not try to achieve consensus, do not solve conflicts. I understand my work as creating a space where these tensions can actually manifest themselves.

My projects are born through collaboration with people. In the events I create, the key elements are those of fiction and holiday, of putting reality into brackets through small interventions in the existing context, exchanging/adding new elements or naming/renaming them. I force the viewer to relate to change, to build a new emotional relationship, to situate themselves in a new, changed landscape.

Interventions change our relationships towards places, and change relations between people - making them aware differences/similarities, generating emotions, sometimes provoking conflicts. But communication, exchange of information, is not the purpose of my work. My intention is to induce such a mental state in people in which they do not have to do anything but sleep or breathe together. I do not attempt to bring people closer, I merely want them to relate to each other. To meet each other, to accept the simple fact that we are next to each other in the same space.

I studied with Jerzy Nowosielski, painter, mystic, and expert in Orthodox Christian theology. Professor often said that in order to paint an object well you had to become that object, identify with it. Behind those words was the long tradition of icon painting, a tradition in which the object is not represented by painting, but is present through it.

Thus painting became for me the experience of a living, intense contact with reality, a means of communication. Transposed into the sphere of interpersonal relations, the experience became an incentive to create situations and events in which the most important element is an intense, non-verbal relation between individuals.

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