Jeanne Susplugas: Side Effects / 5 October 2007, 7 pm



OPENING: FRIDAY, 5 October, 7 pm
6 October - 20 November
Wyspa Institute of Art is open from tuesday to sunday from 12.00-18.00.

Before coming on the opening please write your name on the list: wyspainfo@wp.pl

“Side Effects” is the second exhibition after “You won’t feel a thing” to be organised by the Wyspa Institute of Art and referring to the personal and rather rarely explored side of politicalness. It talks about suffering or perhaps rather, to cite Michel Houllebecq, about “a person incapable of happiness”. It talks about the mechanisms of its functioning in a manipulated world but also of the side effects of the search for perfection in every sphere of life – anxieties, frustrations, feelings of guilt and, as a result, the flight from reality.

In the decided majority of the works by Jeanne Susplugas, who comes from a family of pharmacists, there appear medicaments. Medicines have accompanied her since childhood and have effectively become the object of artistic searches. Jeanne’s works arrange themselves into the intimate history of a person burning with a fever, who, in appearing before us entirely naked, allows us to enter the sphere of intimacy. She confides in us. She tells us how she escapes to her own interior, to disease, in order to hide from the world. Bathing in a bath full of medicines, like Bernini’s Saint Teresa, she endures suffering and experiences ecstasy. The medicaments hide within themselves many contradictions. They cannot be rejected because they save lives but overdosing can also bring death. Sterile cleanliness, precisely measured doses and courses of treatment are supposed to cure us of the pain of existence. In the world created by Jeanne, disease is the norm and health is merely an unattainable ideal to which we aspire.

Selected works also make us aware of the influence of the consumer culture on the perception and application of pharmaceuticals. This culture not only produces goods and services but also the need to acquire and apply them. It creates, as Jacek Zydorowicz wrote in the book “Artistic Virus”, an artificial awareness, susceptible to manipulation, which the individual, together with artificially created desires, will consider as authentic and as his or her own. In relation to the interiors of the Wyspa Institute of Art , there will appear a performative installation entitled “Maison Malade”, drawing the viewer into its interior and at the same time opening up a field of considerations about the pharmaceutical industry and inclining to reflection about its geopolitical and economic dimension.

Curator:
Roma Piotrowska

Substantive guardianship:
Aneta Szyłak

Cooperation:
Ola Grzonkowska
Agnieszka Nasierowska
Maks Bochenek

Organization:
Instytut Sztuki Wyspa
Fundacja Wyspa Progress


Text: Roma Piotrowska
English translation © Tadeusz Z. Wolański

The exhibition is accompanied by a book published by the Wyspa Art Institute and Archibooks in cooperation with the French Embassy in Poland.

Organizatorzy:
Instytut Sztuki Wyspa
Fundacja Wyspa Progress

Partner w publikacji książki:
Ambasada Francji w Polsce

Sponsorzy:
Candia

Świat Serów
Cezex

Patroni medialni:
Wygrzeb.com

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Aktivist

Modelator
Nadajnik.pl
Nouvelle Europe


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