Zuza Piekoszewska, Natalia Karczewska, Magda Starska, Grzegorz Bożek, Paweł Marcinek und Przemysław Piniak

(curated by Łęctwo)

31.07 – 19.08.2022

Lothringer 13 Studio, Lothringer Straße 13, 81667 Munich

 

Opening Speech:

Many of you here know GiG from its days at Baumstr. 11. Some of you might even remember the last series of exhibitions there, ‘Thinking Nature’ featuring artists such as Elke Dreier, Johanna Strobel, Kalas Liebfried, Julia Klemm, Justin Liebermann, Lilian Robl and many others. This exhibition is a continuation of that series, but with a slight shift in focus: instead of thought, the theme is memory. How it relates to our thinking about nature remains unchanged. 

For this exhibition, GiG invite Lectwo from Poznan, Poland, and its director, Przemek Sowiński to be the curator. He in turn responded to the theme through this idea of ‘breath’ as something physical, something shared and something transformative. We breathe out slowly when we hear something surprising – we inhale sharply in fear. Together with our heartbeat, breathing structures our sense of time, each breath already past, present and future. If when thinking, the concept of memory often becomes too much like the concept of history, a series of events arranged according to importance, the memories held in a breath have a linearity free from such punctuation. They are alive. 

As an introduction to the exhibition, Dr. Sebastian Truskolaski traveling from Berlin, kindly agreed to hold a brief discussion of Adorno’s short text, ‘Heliotrope’. We chose this  text together as a good way of engaging with the themes of the exhibition: breathing, memory, nature (Heliotropism being the ability of plants to turn towards the sun). The text takes the shape of Adorno’s childhood memory. A glamorous aunt comes to visit, carrying suitcases with stickers from exotic locations. Little Theodor breaths in the heavy scent of her French perfume and is immediately transported to the world of grown-ups, which is also a long-lost fairyland. The child at once gains access to a foreign land, and recovers what he once had.