'iwona zajac'

In a performative art project taking place at the City Gallery of Gdansk, the artist Iwona Zajac is letting young students transform her. Every third day she also invites an artist to create an installation on one wall of the gallery, in dialogue with her project.

 

The Ideal Lab is a project Iwona Zajac has been working on since 2008. This time it’s students working in her studio at the Gdansk shipyard, “The Young Crew”, who re-make, re-create and change Zajac into an ideal woman. Or, try out different ideals for women, ideals flooding over media.

 

In what seems like a never-ending make-over-mania in magazines and TV, you need to change to become a person of significance. The message is easy to understand. I thought it was an April fools' joke when I read that a handbook “All you need to know about surgical operations” was published in Sweden. Such an everyday title. Could have been “All your need to know about Italian cooking” or “All you need to know about travelling in Spain”.

 

I come to think about the video “Doll-clothes” from 1975 where Cindy Sherman dresses herself up in different clothes, in a paper cut-out-doll-manner. She gets out of her flat plastic pocket in an album and realizes, like Eva, that she is naked.  After picking a dress she dances around on a chest of drawers, when large hands seize her and put her back into the album again. Watch technique from the beginning of the video-technique-era for artists, still of present interest:  http://vodpod.com/watch/1092523-cindy-sherman-doll-clothes-1975

 

Gdansk Galeria Miejska is open a few days more for this project, until April 8. Here you can also cuddle up in a small dark video-room with wall-paintings.

If you are not in Gdansk this last week of the project, you can see a permanent work of hers - one of Zajac' murals can be seen during a visit at the Contemporary Art Centre Laznia. In the staircase on the highest floor you can even meet her in a self-portrait, or is it maybe her own mother? You can’t be sure since the mural is about the relation between herself and her mother. Still, one white spot on the murals remains, but the work is soon to be finished Zajac and curator Agnieszka Wolodzko says.

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