Anamnesis / FOTOFESTIWAL 2025
Dominika Sadowska and Wojciech Leder
Galeria Wschodnia, Łódź, PL
7 - 29.06.2025
exhibition opening: 07.06, 7:00 p.m
Form may become a tool to comprehend the incomprehensible. In Greek, anamnesis refers to discovering knowledge in the process of recalling the actually experienced or imagined visions.
Photography does not need to represent visibility. In fact, it may be a copy, a model, a counterpart, fiction. In essence, it relies on resemblance. Representation in which the depth of field is a significant rigorous principle that binds the illusions of spatiality, it may derive from or aim towards reality, seeking comprehension.
Curators: Jerzy Grzegorski, Adam Klimczak
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The enigmatic word Anamnesis, which is the title of this exhibition, derives from the Greek and still means an interview with a patient in order to diagnose his current state of illness on the basis of symptoms extracted from memory. Anamnesis is also a concept of cognition derived from the Platonic tradition, based on recalling a previously discovered metaphysical reality recorded in images, oral philosophical disputes and myths. It is also about recalling the oldest versions of history underlying the dogmas of faith, going back to the origins of the pillars of a particular religion, perpetuating the laws of faith linking human life to the existence of the supernatural world, the world of divine powers and the Mystery of Existence.
Translated directly into the language of art, anamnesis is the process of realising that creation is a constant clash between what is conscious and what is hidden in our subconscious, which influences the process of defining ourselves, our identity and, ultimately, the shape of the proposed work. Jacques Derrida understood ?autobiographical anamnesis? as the process of recalling real events, experiences, emotions, as well as contents, images, ideas and fictions fished out of oblivion, which we were not the authors of, but which influence the formation of our identity as much as real events.
Everything around is fluid, changeable, undergoing transformation. Many factors dislocate people and force them to build their identity from scratch. Lost, drifting in the ever-increasing chaos of events, we live in a world full of contradictions, struggling for survival, struggling to maintain mental balance we sink deeper and deeper into ourselves. We succumb to traumas, experience major and minor crises.
In Wojciech Leder's monumental paintings created over the past three years, absence is revealed in the remnants of presence. The outlined images are devoid of explicitness and sharpness, more important in them is the invalidation, blurring, denial of reality than any attempt to define it. They are somewhat reminiscent of an image projected on the walls of some inner pinhol, as if the artist wanted to look inside himself and pick out something meaningful from the darkness of memory. There is nothing comforting in these paintings. They are downright depressing, lacking light, and barely outlined fragments of space sink into the depths of the painting. The dark, almost black compositions show painful cracks suggesting a collapsing world and the absence of some important figure. These paintings emanate the tragedy of the absence of an irretrievably lost, ordered world. The artist is trying to confront a sense of emptiness, perhaps even a lack of meaning. He feeds on the illusion of building an image of the transformation of light absorbed by death. He looks into the other side of nothingness to find something existing there, beyond his own fear. Something that will give us an answer, as in anamnesis, whether there is still a chance for recovery, a chance for a reviving light to appear in this darkness, which will reverse the course of history, reverse the direction of man's destructive actions, give him faith in life, in God, in the powerful man of the future.
Dominika Sadowska's attitude and her recent artistic gestures, on the other hand, point to another form of crisis in the artist's identity and role in the contemporary world. This is due to a loss of trust in the processes of visualization taking place in the field of culture, and fatigue with the excess of photographic images produced and reproduced in a manipulated form. The image of reality shaped with the help of photography and photo-processing programs increasingly distances the image from material reality. Photography is losing its referential credibility, is subject to constant manipulation, and even its purest forms are being commercialized. The aggressive and often out-of-control involvement of artificial intelligence algorithms in the redundant production of images reduces the degree of controlling authorization of artifacts depriving not only the profits of their original authors, but also undermining the sense of producing new images using the camera and the human eye. The artist's creation of artifacts in the process of creative work, during which he showed manual skill, talent, courage in shaping new forms and naming them, has been largely undermined, degraded or at least bracketed as an unnecessary form of their materialization. Dominika Sadowska seems to disagree with this state of affairs. Abandoning the production of new photographic images, she stands to compete with the creations of AI by building, without the use of computer programs and machines, hypothetical models of space. He uses the work of his own hands, a chisel and a soft material such as a slab of Styrofoam to create them. The objects obtained in this process refer to forms mediated from Nature. They are somewhat reminiscent of geological mock-ups -fragments of a non-existent landscape, mountains. The artist seems to be telling us ''This is how virtual worlds made by man, not by machine are created.'' In the space of some of the objects, the artist pastes photographs, about which it is impossible to know exactly where and by whom they were taken. Their spectral structure blurs the details and characteristics of the time of day and place, leaving the work of building associations and confronting memory to the viewer. Anamnesis makes itself known in a new version, forcing us to extract our own memories and emotions, activating an imagination useful for reading and redefining the world whose image we have come to confront. But we have to build these ''reading algorithms'' and interpretations ourselves, with the help of our own minds, because no AI will help us.
Jolanta Ciesielska
