KRES / Borderlands

The exhibition "Kres" tells a story of borderlands, liminality and the uncertainty associated with them. It is a story of the exhaustion of the familiar and the settled. The forest, as a liminal space, blurs the boundaries between animal and human, domestic and migratory. The exhibition evokes borderline experiences through a choreography of steps and sounds, the proximity of history and the fear associated with it. However, it also depicts concrete gestures of empathy that can alter the course of events.

From the perspective of the West, which emerged as dominant in the Enlightenment era, Eastern Europe was depicted by travellers and intellectuals as a 'gloomy forest' (William Coxe), a region barely touched by human intervention. As Larry Wolf writes in his seminal work, "Inventing Eastern Europe" (1994), it is a geographical area with ever-shifting borders, sometimes extending as far as the Bug River, the Volga or the Urals. This geographical uncertainty makes the region vulnerable and subjected it to top-down definitions in the form of colonisation, occupation and/or extraction.

The forest is a mental space; more often a premonition than factual knowledge. It is a margin of cognition, attracting with the unknown, although it quickly dispels the fantasy that it is something from beyond. It is very much of this world and has witnessed everything. Only occasionally, especially at night, does a galactic chill blow from it.

Zofia nierodzińska's large-format paintings depict a forest that bears witness to a history of violence. They serve as a reminder of the events that occurred in the 20th century, as well as the ongoing situation at the Polish-Belarusian border. nierodzińska's paintings do not allow us to forget; they raise questions about Polish society's complicity in crimes committed against the Jewish minority during the occupation, as well as about the current border regime. They are an attempt to take responsibility for the violence that we, as a society, accept and from which there is no escape. What has been repressed returns in everyday conversations, political choices and neighbourly relations, in slips of the tongue and mental shortcuts that perpetuate discriminatory cultural patterns. Violence against minorities is not an exception, but rather a cultural matrix. The consequence is the growth of the forest border in the very centre of the city, as foretold by the witches in "Lady Macbeth". Once 'the forest sets out', nothing remains as it was.

There was a follow-up event "Contaminated Landscapes, Forest as a Witness" at Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz organised as part of the project.