The third decade of the 21st century is the time of ruins. To grasp it, it is enough to think about places ravaged by war or suspended in the peculiar but equally destructive state between no-peace and no-war. We have seen the sea of ruins in Palestine, Ukraine, Syria, Yemen, Sudan… But it is also the time of societies having been ruined by economic crises, climatic chaos, pandemic, and the erosion of democracy. These concerns affect not only the unfortunate peripheries but also the complacent and self-satisfied centres of global capitalism. And it is also the moment when many optimistic visions have collapsed of the borderless international community firmly progressing towards emancipation. In such moments, we experience what Judith Butler refers to as a sense of fragility and vulnerability. In this kind of historical context, Marx’s famous quote: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind,” no longer conveys, as it originally did, the hope for change, but rather reverberates with the feeling of overpowering uncertainty. This effect has been amplified by a coinciding development: our realization of the historical nature of nature itself, brought about by the process that can be defined as the culmination (or perhaps the most advanced stage?) of the Anthropocene. The period marked by significant human impact on Earth. The impact that not only affects nature but literally ruins it. These phenomena and experiences make up the context in which certain features of Bożenna Biskupska’s sculptures and paintings resonate. And vice versa, these features may be used as instruments to interpret the conditions that amplify them.

In a sense, the mood seems to have returned that inspired and defined the aura of the artist’s early works in the 1970s. They referred to the commemorative paradigm of the Holocaust that today gets brutally updated by multiple acts of ethnic cleansing, genocide, and imperial aggression producing not only mass death and destruction, but also multimillion waves of migration and xenophobic reactions to their visible presence of the comfort-loving citizens of the European Union and other parts of the so-called “better world”. In these circumstances, the fragility is revealed of Biskupska’s anthropoid figures from the Mystery of Time series created for the Venice Biennale in 1984. For years, works from the Non Omnis Moriar series continuing the idea were part of the exhibition at the Museum of Auschwitz. Today, they are displayed in the complex of the former Grunwald sanatorium at Sokołowsko, partially renovated but still revealing the ravages of time. Topped with disproportionately small heads, the monumental trunks formed of organic matter: resin, hemp, sawdust, sisal, are open on the inside to what is not protected by the external armour. Other works, like the objects from the Slab Sculptures series need to be supported to stand upright. Their insides split open and thus revealing the material of which they are built make them part of a different history. They are marked by the Anthropocene but at the same time attempt to venture beyond its manmade horizon.
The recurring anxiety about the threat of war and witnessing the multifarious forms of extermination spreading across the global South gest amplified by the excesses of the Anthropocene, first of all excessive extractivism, the unmitigated removal of natural resources resulting in irreversible depletion of the planet, and also accelerating deforestation and devastation of natural landscape as well as seizing of land in order to commodify the yet-unexploited geographical areas, geological structures, cultural heritage, and fragments of animated nature. In reference to these processes, Achille Mbembe uses the umbrella term of brutalism. What the philosopher from Cameroon has in mind is not the Brutalist tendency in modern architecture. He points to the global system whose extensive reproduction is based on crushing all forms: social and natural, animate and inanimate, to eliminate any resistance and acquire material to reconstruct, synthesize, and deconstruct the world according to the logic of unlimited accumulation of capital. Mbembe’s perspective seems to correspond to certain themes in Bożenna Biskupska’s creative trajectory. First of all, when he emphasizes the turn towards materiality. Towards the level to which the form gets reduced of the social and natural world (Canadian geographer Jason W. Moore terms it “world-ecology”) – and which is not reducible any further. To Mbembe and Biskupska alike, matter is this surplus which cannot be processed any further in capitalism’s metabolic system. Towards matter so construed torn the colossi from The Mystery of Time series, objects from the Drawings of Sculpture cycle or the One-Legged figurines. Matter is the indestructible evidence of what used to be social or natural form but has been destroyed, exploited, processed. As such, can it effectively resist?

Biskupska’s objects do not comment on resistance but rather are its symptoms or manifestations. This becomes clear when put in the context of her creative practice. The works and the practice are two aspects of the same process of production. As such, they extend over time. The majority of Biskupska’s objects arise within never-ending cycles, like The Demarcation of the Image, comprising sculptures and paintings created over the course of decades, multiplied in numerous iterations with only minor variations – this aspect provides an important key to decoding the artist’s ideological programme.

Biskupska’s approach to matter and making brings to mind the category of “obstinacy” or “stubborn persistence” developed by Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt. Departing from Hegel’s anthropology of man making himself in the process of transforming and absorbing nature, they strive to put the very production process in the historical context of modernity. In other words, they deconstruct the abstract subject to reclaim the antagonistic nature of the activity that brings it into being. Thus, following in the footsteps of Marx, they restore the historicity of the process of subjectivity formation, but – in contrast to Marx – they approach it from the labour’s perspective. This way, they simultaneously reclaim the historical and the material.

The conception of Kluge and Negt emphasizes the specific nature of the agency of the labour structurally imprisoned between two necessities: the system-imposed class logic of the capital and the resistance of matter being transformed in the production process. What allows the labour to continuously resist this double imprisonment is its obstinacy, or stubborn persistency, in circumventing and alleviating the former necessity, that is production practice resisting its own alienation. In a sense, both forms of obstinacy seem present in the approach of Biskupska, who in an interview has defined herself as a “radical labourer of art”. Her practice is permeated by stubborn persistence in reclaiming her own agency when confronted with two exigencies: on the one hand the threat of being crushed by history (like in Auschwitz and in the era of brutalism) and on the other, the resistance and inertia of matter. Perhaps this approach is most evident in the ceaselessly produced hieroglyphs that fill the paintings from the Demarcation of the Image and Packaging series and subsequently materialize in the One-Legged figures made in multiple series of radically different formats. The objects resulting from this long process get arranged into spatial installations. The artist has never envisioned them as single and isolated. For this reason, her exhibitions need space: they invade it, occupy, and re-organize, and consequently define its expanse and boundaries. Thus, they counteract the compression of space effected by brutalism.

If the obstinate wrestling with the fragility and brutalism of the Anthropocene is at the heart of today’s world-ecology while remaining the key function of contemporary art and – first of all – social, economic, and political practices, then not only does Bożenna Biskupska grasp and reveal the state of affairs, but by engaging in the struggle also her art gives us useful instruments to resist and inspiration to do so.

Przemysław Wielgosz