Time Gates
Angela Stief

„Wenn man die Rechnungen nicht zahlen kann, kommen die Beamten. Wir haben hier eine Kneipe, die Endstation für diejenigen, die keinen anderen Ausweg finden.“ Frau Ala Monika Piorkowskas bevorzugtes Genre ist das Porträt als ,expanded portraiture’, ihre künstlerische Strategie der Dialog und ihr Medium die Aneignung einer fremden Stimme, die als verknappter und stark redigierter Text, die Kunstwerke in Handouts begleitet. Die Künstlerin, die 1977 in Krakau geboren wurde und seit 2003 in Wien lebt und arbeitet, interessiert sich für Randexistenzen, Menschen, die in Isolation leben, häufig in Parallelgesellschaften abgetaucht sind und manchmal als soziale Mängelwesen den Austausch im Rahmen des Gemeinwesens verloren haben. Eine intensive Unterhaltung mit diesen Personen, die irgendwo auf der Welt, in Österreich, Polen und den USA leben, liefert dann auch die künstlerische Initialzündung und bildet das inhaltliche sowie ästhetische Fundament für eine sozialkritische Praxis, die das Persönliche mit dem Politischen verbindet. Das digitale Fotomaterial der Serie Time Gates, die von 2011 bis 2014 entstanden ist, nimmt Piorkowska während ihrer Gespräche auf. Nicht die Wiedererkennbarkeit des Antlitzes, sondern die Geschichte, krisenhafte Momente und soziale Instabilitäten in den Biografien einzelner Menschen stellen einen von der Intuition gesteuerten, roten Faden dar, von dem sich Piorkowska leiten lässt. Um bildnerische Wirkungen zu erzielen, verzichtet Piorkowska in dieser Serie, die mittlerweile 8 Werke umfasst, auf die Effekthascherei gängiger Reportagemethoden und die Genauigkeit von Dokumentationsmedien. Die Technik folgt dabei dem Muster der menschlichen Interaktion: Das Bildmaterial wird nicht nach Kriterien der Schönheit, der Komposition oder gar der dokumentarischen Entsprechung geordnet, stattdessen stellt die Arbeit in Lagen und Schichten die ephemeren Worte der Erzählung, die sich auf der Zeitachse entfalten und sich sui generis der permanenten Fixierung in der bildenden Kunst widersetzen, palimpsestartig nach. In ihren großformatigen Leuchtkästen hebt die Künstlerin sensibel und einfühlsam das Drama des Alltäglichen im buchstäblichen Sinne des Wortes ins Licht der öffentlichen Wahrnehmung. Das Prinzip, dem die Künstlerin dabei folgt, ist die Irritation: Unangenehme Geschichten unterlaufen mehrschichtig schöne Bilder.
In der Ausstellung Time Gates im polnischen Institut in Wien präsentiert Monika Piorkowska eine Auswahl von Arbeiten aus der gleichnamigen Serie in Kombination mit einer zur Partizipation einladenden Installation 500 Zloty, die aus 500 Stück Piroggen (gefüllte Teigtaschen) besteht. Die polnische Nationalspeise, die Piorkowska selbst gekocht hat, ist als Give-away konzipiert – kleine Geschenke an die Besucher, die während der Eröffnung gegessen werden dürfen und mit denen sich die Künstlerin ihr Publikum in Analogie zur demagogischen Praxis mancher Politiker gewogen machen will. Die Farben der Piroggen – rot und weiß – sind eine Anspielung auf die polnische Flagge und richten den Blick auf die dortige politische Situation. Die Schau Time Gates ist deshalb auch eine kritische Hommage an die Heimat der Künstlerin. Eine Auseinandersetzung mit einer Welt, die zunehmend unter starken sozialpolitischen Spannungen leidet, in der der Rechtspopulismus längst Regierungsgewalt hat und demokratische Werte bedroht sind.

NARRATIVE

Birgit Laback

Time Gates is Monika Piorkowska’s latest work, a 15 piece series so far that has been in continuous development since 2011 and succeeds her previous series, Time Boxes. Each Time Gate is a double sided, transparent light-object that reads as a (time) gate to past narratives. In her last presentation at Vienna’s VIERTELNEUN gallery, the installation of her works transformed the main exhibition hall into an emotionally charged space with an almost sacral air. In total seven objects hung from the gallery’s two long walls. One of the pieces depicted a man’s tattooed back. He appeared to be heading for an eighth work, which then led the viewer’s attention to the back area of the exhibition space from which the viewers had the impression of a woman walking toward them.

Created as double-sided wall-objects, the individual Time Gates manifest themselves as spaces within the exhibition space. “Doors,” attached to the wall by hinges on the edgeways of the pieces, can be moved by the visitor. In their opened state the sculptures create intimate environments that almost enclose the viewer physically. With a format of 200 x 100 cm per gate, the depicted people are nearly life size and implicitly engross the viewer with their presence. The boxes, which are created by the artist using a unique UV-printing technique on acrylic glass, reveal various impressions that change according to site-specific lighting and the viewer’s perspective. Elements become suddenly and unexpectedly visible and disappear again. As a result of LEDs with which they can be illuminated, the works are reminiscent of the illuminated billboards found in cities. Their appellative character is, however, circumvented by Piorkowska, because neither their protagonists nor their color scheme – with its strong light dark contrasts – coincide with advertising aesthetics. Against the backdrop of the light boxes’ corporal presence their quotidian and intimate scenes are like sketches of an idea that do not permit clear associations.

The initial point for every piece is always a performative act of conversation between the portrayed person and the artist herself. Each piece follows a uniform method. In Time Boxes, the series that preceded Time Gates and which followed a similar concept, Piorkowska ended interviews with her Skype partners with the question: "What are you taking along?" In Time Gates she begins her dialogs with: "Please tell me something lyrics!" If the conversation partners from Time Boxes had known that this question would be repeated at the end of the following conversation, which would have helped in picking up from the last conversation and with answering the question, then asking the question at the start made it even more difficult for the interviewees to come up with an answer, to tell stories, to quote things spontaneously, and to open themselves up.

Piorkowska’s Time Gates discuss narratives and the artist chooses appropriate presentations that further investigate narrative structures and the essence of what is being revealed. Walter Benjamin described the essence of narration as the ability to exchange experience. [1] Contrary to Benjamin’s claim that information, with its claim to novelty and verifiability, is “considered comprehensible,”[2] experience is indeed related in detail, but its context isn’t imposed. The narrative therefore causes one to reflect, and should lead to an understanding of contexts. With this in mind, the narrative has the ability to function significantly in the formation of knowledge, belief and world view.

According to the artist, “a society is easy to manipulate,” and she makes an appeal for personal responsibility. Considering her interest in ontological questions, Piorkowska examines fundamental structures that make up human existence – in particular speech, comprehension, experience and space-time. In doing so she strives for complexity and seeks narratives that link the individual and micro-political experience. Each one of the Time Gates was created on one of the artist’s travels, this time however, not on Skype but on site. As a tourist, this state of transience lends some distance to her observations. It detaches her from her own roots, forces her to experience things from an outside perspective; she is separated from them, surprised by their fleetingness and foreignness. This is not the first time Piorkowska has worked with so-called Non-lieux (non-places)[3] – including vacation and recreation resorts (Almost like a Story of Ark Noah … but in 2012 andLeela), hotels (Auf Zimmersuche), antique stores (General), and public spaces (Virus, North America and A Story with a Happy End). Comprehending foreign existences, past cultures and personalities leads to a reshaping of the self.

In one of the pieces from the Time Gates series, A Story with a Happy End, the story of a man who had been convicted to a life sentence is concealed behind a depiction of an attractive woman posing for a picture with the police who returned her handbag. The convicted man was innocent, as everyone knew, but no one could prove it (“Normally happy endings only exist in the movies“).

The light object Virus also deals with prejudices and its consequences. Among the thousands of beach-goers on Coney Island a man whose presence caused pedestrians to avoid him grabbed Piorkowska’s attention. He used to be a dancer. In the interview he describes how dancing is like a virus, “that spreads within you and makes your body its habitat.” After an accident leaving him with burn scars across his entire back, which he tried to cover up with tattoos, he couldn’t return to where he had left off with his career. He is convinced that the accident was a consequence of his homosexuality. What remains is an elegant walk and a tense upright posture. We see his bare torso from behind, seemingly following a crowd of people. The backside of the light box depicts his inverted image. The distance to the surrounding people in a way become a fog isolating him, at the same time this aura singles him out. The few faces we saw from the crowd of pedestrians appear to have been erased. Just like his facial expression, the dancer’s slightly stooped posture is an outward image of his inner state. His personality is indicated by his expressive body language, which drags him out of the realm of anonymity. Although Piorkowska reveals the experiences of her interviewees journalistically in her works – and makes them available to her audience as textual references – it is the surface that shapes conclusions about the backgrounds of the portrayed people. Surfaces – such as facial expressions, gestures, speech, or ways of speaking and above all variations in posture and clothing – convincingly inform us about an individual’s emotional condition and his or her relationship towards society.

At first glance Piorkowska’s subjects seem like incidental snapshots of everyday scenes. Upon closer inspection, however, it becomes apparent that they are in fact elaborately constructed productions. The artist selects and layers numerous photographs of each of the portrayed persons taken during the various interview sessions in her objects, and uses these to tell stories. However, she obscures more than she reveals with these narratives. She likes to preserve their mystery. Although her protagonists’ faces aren’t always visible, we believe we “know” these people. She takes further measures to intensify this sense of “intimacy from a distance”: Stripped from their everyday situations (a before and after, and environment-specific noises) these photographed and frozen moments become definitive, composed and by this almost staged.

The viewer is also not aware of the subject’s condensed narratives and precarious fates, which are the point of departure for her Time Gates. This information is accessible to only very few people. Personal notes for each piece and its respective interviewee exist and are included as handouts in the exhibition. Yet due to their porous nature, they can be regarded as mere clues that simply propose a preferred reading. In doing so the artist dissolves linear narration. All artists that deal with new media are in some way aware of the fact that every image that is created using new media is likely composed of fragments. In the media these often suggestive images are sold to us as reality. Piorkowska’s artistic strategy retains the ability to communicate the construction of images. It is precisely this transparency that elicits the blurriness of her works. Piorkowska is concerned with the structures of narratives. She deconstructs them, and shows interest in social mechanisms whose sets of rules she dresses in narrative motifs. She explores erotic taboos and questions of gender, history, or injustice within the social order. In leaving didactic meaning open for interpretation (through the oscillation between the individual depictions, texts or titles), Piorkowska performs civic resistance.

In his latest book Byung Chul Han identifies the terms “transparency and transcendency” as opposites.[4] While the imagination’s blurriness or indistinctness creates rooms for maneuver where nothing is clearly defined, transparency lacks the possibility for such a semantic and temporal compression. Against the backdrop of two of modern art’s best known paintings, Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) and Gerhard Richter’s Ema (1966), Piorkowska's Z. Akt auf einer Treppe addresses one of art history’s classic subjects. Normally however, the female is exposed and becomes an object of desire or projection for societal realities or ideals, while the naked male’s preferred portrayal, if at all, is as a hero or martyr. In Piorkowska’s work, photographs that the artist took while conducting an interview of a descending nude male are projected onto the staircase he descended from. The result is a shadowy figure exposed to the viewer’s stare. The man, “Z” appears almost ghostlike. This is achieved by a combination of formal disintegration and resistance to it.

For Gerhard Richter blurriness signifies obliteration, “it makes everything level, equally important and unimportant ... so that all elements come together.”[5] For Beat Streuli – whose portraits of anonymous pedestrians, who he photographed in countless urban spaces as snapshots, and which also deal with themes of transit as a thin barrier between the individual and the crowd, the private and public realms, and enabling the viewer take part in the intimate and private world of strangers without revealing their secrets – the space between vividness, blurriness and movement make vision a sensual and pleasurable experience.[6] For Monika Piorkowska blurriness is a perspectival tool that is informed by the fragmentation of narrative. She stores individual layers of narrative as discrete image layers and condenses fleeting moments into single images. A narrative is composed of two situations – one present and one absent one. The simultaneity of non-simultaneity is formally intelligible in Piorkowska’s image layers. The artist freezes the elements of time, moment and intangibility layer for layer and transforms them into “a presence.” Consequently the actual theme of the Times Gates series is not transience, as is often assumed, but the present.

Such grounding of the present as well as the functionality of narrative and memory are the themes of General another piece from the Time Gates series. In the midst of a darkened room we recognize a uniformed male figure. His cap is pulled down over his face so that we do not see much aside from a mustache. Antique furnishings are just barely visible in the composition. The contextual background for this image is only made accessible with the help of an accompanying text. The alleged general turns out to be a mannequin and the object of an antique dealer’s narrative. He tells us about his childhood memories and his dream of becoming a general, and as such a hero. The mannequin has become a tangible monument, as well as a reference for the antiques dealer’s fleeting memories. Its uniform references a specific moment in our collective history to which individual memories are attached. The backside of this “gate” reveals a dense collage of antiques. Not every object can function as a symbol of history, but it can invoke memories. These heterogeneous and fragmental personal memories can then be passed on as narratives.

Time Gates was conceptualized as a traveling exhibition. On each station a new piece will be produced that references local conditions. In Vienna the piece was Künstlerbrot: a 2kg artwork made out of crystal glass that references the Viennese coffee house and bakery tradition. Twelve transparent loafs of bread are set on a table and illuminated from below. What we find here, instead of sweet patisseries, is the hard won bread of an artist, which must furthermore be shared with others from the art world. The fragility of the material and the noble display design are charged with irony by the commonness of the motif itself. Because of its divergent formal language Künstlerbrot can be read as an installation within the installation of the Time Gate series.[7] This time however, it is the artist who has contributed something of her own, even without interviews. Doesn’t it miss transparency?

Künstlerbrot also references the specificity of the culture of language. We feel the urge to make sense of the world on a daily basis. Just like everyday practices or objects, (Das Schuhkästchen) language weaves a web of habits. Not everything is translatable into every language. (It so happens that the expression “Künstlerbrot” is incomprehensible in many languages – Chinese for example.[8]) But the way in which reality is constructed is decisive. Although reality makes things visible (more transparent), in (medial) images, as in language, it can disguise the underlying structures. One is required to look at people and circumstances closely to achieve an understanding. This also applies to Piokowska’s works (between the narratives, the titles and the layered photographs as pars pro toto, to get to the correlation of it all) which depict a process. “Because it is always possible to order a process with more that one 'marker', to classify it, attribute and to decorate it ... (even when) a pattern of preferred reading exists: and it underlies ... the institutional, political and ideological order ...”[9] Discourse can enable individuals and the society to depart from traditions and find new ways of looking at things.