The exhibition is effectively the premiere of a collective project by Aneta Grzeszykowska and Jan Smaga that has been conceived in parallel to each artist’s individual projects over the past few years.
The focal part of the exhibition is made up of photographs from a joint collection which Grzeszykowska and Smaga refer to as their Private Archive. On the one hand, these images give a peek into the background of the couple’s artistic practices. On the other hand, they provide an indelible record of life in such a partnership. The images take us into the interiors of their home – their workshops and their private spaces where they work, play games, indulge in romance, experimentation and relaxation.
Photographs from the couple’s earlier Plan series have been exhibited before and made their way into various publications. They are a kind of detailed sociological inventory of a contemporary living space. Private Archive is a radical encroachment of that convention. This is a journal of emotion, which records the authors’ fantasies, which are sometimes beautiful, other times shameful. They weave these fantasies into the flesh of their bodies, into their art, pulling down the curtains and opening up an otherwise private discussion on making art and making love.
There hasn’t been such a brazen and suggestive approach in Polish art in recent years for entering into the private and artistic space shared by a couple, or to telling the story of art as a practice for a full life. Not the other way around.
