EXHIBITION / All the Images Will Disappear

In 1988, the Galeria Stodoła in Warsaw hosted a performance act Ziemia i krew [Earth and Blood] by Jerzy Truszkowski and Jacek Rydecki. The action, radical in its form, took as its departure point the personal history of one of the artists’ grandfather which gradually evolved into a narrative of the mechanisms of ideology, violence and power.

The theatrical dramaturgy of successive scenes progressed from ritual dance to regimented march, from brotherly gestures to violence. The performers became figures of colliding political, religious and cultural orders, making it clear that history does not happen beyond a human being but leaves its mark on their body, memory and identity. Involving a Latin cross being cut on Truszkowski’s back, the climactic scene lent this interrelation a literal, almost ritualistic, dimension.

The All the Images Will Disappear exhibition investigates how collective history pervades individual biographies and leaves traces inside them. Its title comes from Annie Ernaux’s The Years, a book which uses personal history as a vehicle for relating the experience of a whole generation. In it, scattered images of memory do not constitute a self-contained tale about a single person but reveal the interweaving of individual lives with the rhythms of social and political transformations. This very perspective determines the exhibition’s starting point. Particularly interesting is the moment when private experience stops belonging solely to an individual, its historical dimension and entanglement in broader social and political processes exposed.

The exhibition is built around the two concepts from the title of the 1988 performance. More than just territory, Earth is here a layer of memory, labour and violence; an archive of transformations, migrations and constantly negotiated borders. It is a space upon which successive political and economic orders become inscribed by leaving behind their infrastructure, ruins, traces of exploitation and world views. Referencing more than simply biology, blood poses questions about the idea of community, genealogies of belonging, the inheritance of memory and mechanisms of exclusion.

This combination is far from innocent. History has repeatedly turned earth and blood into instruments of violence, subjugation and purity phantasms. Borders were drawn up, divisions sanctioned and mechanisms of exclusion set in motion in the name of these. The question remains: what kind of relationships might emerge when these two concepts cease to define the terms of belonging but become a meeting ground for a diversity of experiences and sensibilities? What will happen if we put a “moist flax seed” into soil?