Dolls 👩‍🍼

workshop activities, dolls, video, music, scenography installation

Dolls is a project devoted to researching and processing the cultural imagination about femininity. Barbara Gryka invited a musician, performers, but − most importantly − women from her home village to cooperate with her on this project. The final result in the form of a multithreaded installation is the sum of Gryka’s artistic gestures, the voices and creative activities of the invited women, the soundtrack composed specifically for the project, and elements quoted directly from the reality where the author grew up, and where the protagonists of her artwork still live.

The point of departure consisted in workshop activities for female teachers from the local Rural Housewives Club in Końskowola. Gryka proposed for them to make dolls as peculiar self-portraits. While working on the dolls, she talked to the participants about feminism and the role of women in the family, in the local community, and in the society at large.

The workshops were carried out in the context of stereotypes about women from provincial rural communities, who are frequently perceived by the liberal elites as some kind of victims of the Stockholm syndrome, people who − due to conservative upbringing, become guardians and collaborators of patriarchy, whether they want it or not. Gryka questions that stereotype, breaking towards a more complex reality. “I enter deeply into the female community − says the artist − often forgotten by the feminist discourse, sometimes mocked for being conservative or provincial. When spending time with mothers and grandmothers, I asked them what they were concerned about and what kind of lives they would like to have. The women I talked to often stressed that they did not see the need of change for themselves, but they would like reality to be different for their daughters and granddaughters. I was struck by how rarely they used the word “I”, placing the needs of others above their own.

The results of this project, apart from the dolls created during workshops, include a video. Through animations, Gryka has given life to the dolls that represent project participants; she also quotes their words and thoughts expressed when working together.

The film has been presented in the context of a complex, scenographic installation. The artist placed straw on the floor of the exhibition space, changing the gallery into something resembling a barn or another farm building used to keep animals in the countryside. The space also included textiles dyed with natural pigments, as well as husbandry equipment used at the artist’s home farm. The show was complemented by a soundtrack created specifically for this project. One composition is strongly centered on the rhythmic section, in reference to the rhythm produced by peasants with farming tools at the end of the working day in times of serfdom. The second musical piece, composed by Rafał Rozmus, has been played on a church pipe organ.

The space of this artwork, representing the complex social landscape of the rural province in times of cultural transformation, woven using sounds, smells, voices, and self-presentation of the workshop participants, has also provided a place for performative actions by Waldemar Tatarczuk and Filip Kijowski.

Curated by Katarzyna Krakowiak- Bałka
Text by Stach Szabłowski
Translation by Zofia Piętek
Grey House Gallery, Cracow (PL)
Pictures by Tomasz Kawecki

Dimensions: Cowshed: 950x 397cm h:362cm; Chicken House: 354 x 382cm h:300cm; Barn: 1179 x 285cm h:300cm