´I
met M a few years ago, but I don't know what has happened to him
since. In February I departed for Ireland and took his poem and
play with me. In Cork I often went to the deserted old psychiatric
hospital Our Lady's Hospital of 1852, and its St. Kevin's Ward,
which for 4 years stands empty …210 deserted rooms. The last
patient left its walls in April 2002. In April 2006 I saw a person
there with a dog, lying on a bench. Later on there was only the
dog…The dog was taken by dogcatchers on May 6, 2006`. –
these words, spoken by the protagonist of Anna Konik’s film
Our Lady’s Forever, are part of the artist’s own story.
Several years ago she met a young man suffering from schizophrenia
who gave her the text of a play he had written. The play is a kind
of a love story, a story about the dream to change physically into
the person one loves. It is full of strange images born in the author’s
over-sensitiv mind. The artist took the play with her when she was
leaving, in spring 2006 to Cork in Ireland. There she discovered
Our Lady’s, an abandoned psychiatric hospital, where she made
her film Our Lady’s Forever, to be presented as a multi-channel
single-screen video installation. The film is a story with no beginning
or end, showing two persons – a man and a woman – called
A and M, searching for each other, wandering around the empty corridors
and rooms of the dilapidating building. The scenes, illuminated
with strange, blue light, are a blend of reality and abstraction,
of the real-world and the imaginary, and the whole film is mysterious
and oblique. Our Lady’s Forever is the most poetic of Anna
Konik’s works so far, but also dealing with similar issues
of alienation, strange sensitivity or loneliness as her earlier
works, Toys, Transparency, or In the Middle of the Way. (text
by Ewa Witkowska)
downlodable
text - pdf 56,5 KB
Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, 2007 video stills photos objects texts
Eugen Lendl Gallery, Graz, 2007
Kronika Gallery, Bytom, 2008
Staedtische Gallery Wolfsburg, 2009
Polish Institute Duesseldorf, 2011
