The complex relationship of the private and the public appears in the slide-series of KwieKulik (Zofia Kulik and Przemysław Kwiek) who comment on this relationship by a project about their son’s early years in the early 1970s. The photographs they took have parallel readings; they are private pictures but they also bear the signs of artistic genres, such as the portrait, the still life, or the emblem. Yet these representations are created by using everyday objects and household items, such as crockery, blankets, buckets, vegetables, etc used, arranged and thus elevated to an aesthetic level. The objects’ various configurations form the basis of a kind of semiotic investigation, typical for the artistic concerns of 1970s. In the pictures, the little boy himself often receives the status of an object, thus some of these images are quite disturbing, creating a kind of a counter-narrative of maternity and childcare as opposed to the often sentimental and biased main stream propaganda. The video also comments on the definition of artistic work since the artists’ own surroundings and everyday routine provide the project with a theme, a location, the form and ways of its realization.
(Katalin Timár)