Joanna Sokolowska
Day 1: Conflicts, Crises, and the Politics of Growth
Perspective 2 – 5 November 2021.
Joanna Sokolowska, Independent Curator, Poland.
Abstract
Exercises in Imagination
My presentation will address the power and limitations of the exhibition as a medium of exercising an ecological imagination, empathy and curiosity. How can we display objects in the museum to animate a shared, public sensation of holistic, complex, and biocentric perspectives on inhabiting the Earth? I will focus on two case studies: the exhibitions All Men Become Sisters and Pangea United I curated for Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź. They unfolded around metaphors of sisterhood and earthly household, respectively. Works in the exhibitions were assembled as a kind of aid to imagine life-supportive futures to mold an environment into one that is more bearable to many subjects. These futures are rooted in present, lived, gendered, yet marginalized experiences. They draw on reproductive labor and human faculties for care and responsibility, envisioning them as if they were reevaluated and released from patriarchy and the economy reducing life to that what is calculable. At the same time, I will advocate resisting curatorial authority delivering ready-made concepts and using art for illustrating socio-political narratives. The modest agency of art institutions lies in challenging the simplified rationale reducing the diversity of the web of life on Earth to resources and across national and racist boundaries. To foster the collective imagination, exhibitions should not only generate discourse but also give space for the complexity and poetic force of artworks.
Biography
Joanna Sokolowska, is a freelance curator. In 2009–2021 she worked at Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź as a curator in the Modern Art Department. Through her exhibitions and publications, she has explored artistic practices engaged in the transformation of the ecological and economic imagination. Her curatorial projects have largely developed in relation to her research in the intersection of gender, care work, and the production of (semi) peripheries within the international division of labor. Recently, she has focused on learning holistic, systemic views of life and creativity. Consequently, she started her studies in Process Oriented Psychology. Selected exhibitions include: Pangea United, Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, 2019; For Beyond that Horizon Lies Another Horizon, Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst, Oldenburg, 2017; Exercises in Autonomy: Tamás Kaszás Featuring Anikó Loránt (Ex-artists’ Collective), Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, 2016; All Men Become Sisters, Muzeum Sztuki, 2015/16; Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin. Facts, Incidents, Accidents, Circumstances, Situations (co-curated with Magdalena Ziółkowska), Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, 2013; Workers Leaving the Workplace, Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, 2011; Another City, Another Life (co-curated with Benjamin Cope), Zachęta Narodowa Galeria Sztuki, Warsaw, 2008. One of her major publications is All Men Become Sisters, co-published with Sternberg Press, focusing on feminist perspectives on work and social reproduction in art from the 1970s until today.