Where Dreams of Laurels Lie by Agata Madejska
Private View, 30th of April, 6-9pm
1st of May – 4th of May, 12-7pm
A presentation emerges from Agata Madejska’s month long residency at ACRE.
Crude welded seams, luminous silver, and black. Made-to-measure steel boxes dressed in wholesale shopping bags, ready for pick up: to shift, to migrate, to obliviate. None of them alike, yet all clearly related. Caves for lost plans and unfinished labour, where exhausted performance dissolves into patterns, morphing from the cosy to propaganda at extremis.
These distinct units, charged with a combination of domestic struggle and collective ambition, come with their own visual organisation, hovering between promise and resolve. Drawing from the language of economic models – planned, systematic and developing – each is populated by rudimentary cartoonish images lifted from GDR posters proposing relentless efficiency. Their iconography remains: persistently calling for continuous coordinated activities of thought and labour.
Melamine kitchens (the invisible scaffolding of reproductive work), industrial steel, commercialised fluorescent lamps, and darkrooms reference spaces where labour once reproduced quietly, dexterously and without spectacle. The traces of ORWO (once the largest female employer of East Germany) underlie.
Across these structures in situ familiar motifs recur: a gable, a curtain pelmet, three stripes – symbols that slip between domestic arrangements, everyday endurance and vast systems of planning. The omnipresent three stripes street uniforms stand as a faint echo of the continuous consumer dream – a promise which often ultimates in new forms of familiar standardisation.
Madejska’s work does not anchor itself to one history, ideology, or model. Between care and production, an individual’s persistence / survival and state ambition, between long worn extraction and nauseating overconsumption, the structures falter. Quietly, they point to an unresolvable tension. The frameworks we inhabit – economic, domestic, ideological – are themselves open to collapse at any moment.
Photos by Dotgain and Agata Madejska
To request a viewing time, please contact info@acrestudios.cc
Co- financed by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland and Belmacz, London
- People Agata Madejska
