Schadenfreude
2021
Made of mirrors, the work, prepared especially for the Cut It Out exhibition, is entitled Schadenfreude, which means pleasure derived from another's misfortune or failure. The installation alludes to the private history of the artist, who has studio in Wrocław, in a post-German tenement house built before the First World War, in 1896. In this building, the traces of the original inhabitants have never been completely erased by subsequent Polish tenants. The inscription Schadenfreude becomes legible in the mirror image. It was drawn with a finger on a glass panel covered in dust. Dust in the flat, a tangible effect of everyday existence, appears when cleaning is abandoned. Over time, it covers domestic appliances with an ever thicker layer. In this case, it is a metaphor for the passing into oblivion of the complicated history of the city of Breslau, which became today's Wrocław. The work Cut/Paste, on the other hand, was inspired by Joanna Bator's description of the practice of taking over a photo album, which is a record of someone else's life, and building on it one's own, invented family story. In this context, the artist finds the manipulation of private history interesting. Anna Bujak uses/acquires the <<post-German>> photographs for her own purposes. The brutal gesture of cutting out faces from old photographs encourages the viewer to <<paste>> their ancestors' faces into them and to create anew the structure of a family tree, fixed on someone else's life.
Patrycja Sikora
photos: Michał Pietrzak