PL

The process of art making is an amazing tool to reinforce remembering, recognition and events or people recollection. In British born Katy Bentall's works, besides materiality, one discovers both personal and collective encodings and retrievings of present and past, time and autobiography, memory distortions, amnesia, emotional memories, and so on, and so on. However, there is also an additional important mnemonic dimension beyond the familiar time related art. Bentall's works and her memories are at times strongly and interchangeably linked to the history of Polish contemporary art and to the upbringings of the legendary Warsaw Foksal Gallery in particular. This is what makes, in my view, her new exhibition so intriguing. Several fragments of the installation will incorporate strong visual primes echoing back to performances and situations relating to the life of early Foksal gallery. Bentall relates the later events she witnessed i.e the French artist Daniel Buren re-installing his stripes onto the windows of the Stazewski/Krasinski studio, from the personal perspective of an outsider artist who “bumped into” the gallery's inner circle thanks to her partnership with one of its less talked about founders, Mariusz Tchorek. In fact, in Bentalls' own words: “ I had an interest in Mariusz, not an interest in Foksal Gallery as such; with Mariusz and with Foksals' theoretical foundations, the text The Theory of Place (and this is because he wrote it and I always thought of it as part of him) and, of course, things like Edward Krasiński's blue line I connected largely with Mariusz too - because we visited Krasiński's studio a lot in the early 90's. I have also been, to some extent, in the last 2 or 3 years, working with Mariusz's archive, or as I would call it - the stuff he left behind - so things were quite naturally stirred up for me again. The Foksal material has somehow attached itself to my world rather than me consciously trying to attach myself to Foksal's world!”

Thus, more precicely put, many of Katy Bentall's works have come out of her encounter with Mariusz Tchorek. Her art is in her own words “some sort of poetic transcription of this encounter. A process of slow osmosis which chooses its own path”. She relates these memories in a fantastic, hypertextual way...

Another wave of inspiration for Katy Bentall's exhibition seems to be coming from Rilke's essay “Some Reflections on Dolls”. However, the amalgams of dolls and books; found and mixed media objects, many of them decaying over time, changing their state from hand-made objects, to decomposed matter; photographs, to be put in specific relationship to the Gallery Dzialań' space, might make one recollect Shelley Jackson's peculiar hypertexts “Doll Games” and “Skin”, or on the other hand, Rilke's contemporary, Boris Pasternak, and of the fairly crowded regional city library (a book collection) of (fictional) Yuriatino as described by him in “Doctor Zhivago”, where one could by looking at the library visitors (bodies, dolls that are manipulated by their author into reading books) begin to discover the city's marrow and where one could also meet an acquintance that one has not seen for a long time and to whom one was not emotionally indifferent.

Many scientists claim that in order to understand the complexities of the mind, and therefore of memory as well, one must think in terms of quantum physics. But with the title for this text, I was thinking more about “Schrödinger's cat”, the famous thought experiment that highlights the strange nature of quantum entanglement. Schrödinger was talking about a cat sealed in a box, with a flask of poison, and a radioactive source. If an internal monitor detects radioactivity the flask is shattered, releasing poison that kills the cat. As the experiment begins, and as long as the box is closed, the cat seems to be simultaneously dead and alive. Yet, when one looks in the box, one sees the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead.

Katy has a cat. Her cat does have an uncanny relationship to her work, especially to the cotton reels that she sews with. When she was working on the blue lined dolls the cat unwound the whole reel in the sitting room over night as he played with it.

Bentall's forthcoming exhibition is like the cat in Schrödinger's experiment. There are no easy openings, but this particular one seems to be as precarious, to use a fashionable word, as never before. As I write this I am sure about two things at the same time, namely that the exhibition will take place and that it will not. I imagine that it takes place to the extent that I have actually agreed to write an introduction to it. I have seen many of the works that are to be presented at Galeria Dzialań. I know for a fact that these objects exist. I see them there, in Galeria Dzialań, with my mind's eye. I have talked to Katy Bentall on numerous occasions. Katy also sees it happening. But she also sees empty spaces, collapses, her works evaporating like memories in an amnesia. She is also picturing her opening with her works there but she, herself as absent. It is not an exhibition about her, yet still it is about her.

So, I keep wondering what will happen when the box, I mean the gallery door opens, on March 7th, and the quantum superposition ends and reality collapses into one possibility or the other. But, perhaps, there is something special in this trembling caused by the waiting. No one can force a poet, and Katy Bentall has the privilege of being one, to write and publish the poem before the set deadline. “Before then none knows how it will, this is if it does at all.”

Katy Bentall, „lekko dotykając / lightly touching”, Galeria Działań, Warszawa, 7-22.03.2013 Photographs of exhibition i Galeria Działań by Paweł Gutowski