LOVE TRAP 🛢💔

gold, ( 585, length 60 mm Ø 5,5 mm), video (05:36)

Love Trap is an artwork that combines personal and political themes in a way typical for Barbara Gryka’s practice.

The project consists of a minute flute made of pure gold and a video: recording of a performance for the camera carried out in a scenography built by the artist.

Between 2021 and 2022, Barbara Gryka was staying at the artistic residency centre Schloss Solitude near Stuttgart. It was a time of growing tension in Europe, caused by the preparations of Putin’s regime to invade Ukraine, an exacerbating energy crisis, growing fuel prices, and discussions over the construction of Nord Stream 2 that was supposed to create an even tighter strategic connection between Germany and Russian gas deliveries.

Love Trap is a commentary to that situation. In volatile times, people eagerly invest in precious metals. In line with that logic, the artist bought gold with the entire budget she received from Schloss Solitude to carry out her residency project. Next, she commissioned a jeweller to manufacture a tiny, finger-sized pipe using the gold. This minute instrument produces a sound that is barely louder than a whisper. However, as the artist says, it can become helpful if there is a blackout and you need to signal your position quietly to someone else once European cities bury themselves in crisis and darkness. Gryka points out the tubular shape of the instrument, which is not to be ignored in the context of the huge pipeline of Nord Stream placed along the bottom of the Baltic Sea.

The video features the artist together with Waldemar Tatarczuk – a performer and curator. The pair enacts two grotesque oligarchs in an interior whose colours make reference to the Berlin offices of Gazprom − the Russian energy corporation that employs, among others, the German ex-chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder. In reality, the fake office is like a house of cards − a scenography made of paper, placed on top of an ordinary kitchen in the author’s apartment, and a cardboard maquette where the “oligarchs” devise their strange, mysterious machinations.

The object and video were created in collaboration with Waldemar Tatarczuk.

Text by Stach Szabłowski
Translation by Zofia Piętek
“Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution, WARSAW IN CONSTRUCTION, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (PL)
Curated by Tomasz Fudala, Jan Mencwel
Pictures by Diana Kołczewska, Emilia Lipa

https://wwb14.artmuseum.pl/en/prace/nord-stream-2