Thicket

Agnieszka Brzeżańska / My Scent is a Scent of a Woman

We invite you to participate in Agnieszka Brzezanska's installation, which will take place in the foyer of Nowy Teatr half an hour before the performance of "L'Étang / The Pond" by Gisele Vienne.

We invite you to participate in Agnieszka Brzezanska's installation, which will take place in the foyer of Nowy Teatr half an hour before the performance of "L'Étang / The Pond" by Gisele Vienne.

The second protagonist of the exhibition My Scent is a Scent of a Woman is Agnieszka Brzeżańska. „We are water”, emphasizes the artist inviting us to take a deep drag of the scent mixture she has prepared.

Agnieszka Brzeżańska sees the river as a place of harmony and freedom. Since 2016 she has spent every summer on the river together with Ewa Ciepielewska in the framework of their artistic project FLOW/PRZEPŁYW. A wooden galar boat on which they go down the Vistula is a temporary salon, a residency program hosting befriended artists, as well as a place of retreat. Vistula with its surrounding thickets is a hiding place and a mystery. A Hydro-puzzle.

Wormwood might be associated with Artemisia Gentileschi, one of Brzeżańska’s favourite painters. Hence, it does not come as a surprise that the plant became a starting point for the artist. Its green leaves have been known for their healing qualities for ages. A bitter medicine tasting of moist soil and mud, used for relieving pain and breaking fever. It is the main ingredient of the medicine for malaria and since August 2021 has been also tested by WHO for possible use against Covid-19.

The aroma of wormwood is also a sign of decay, which however, does not necessarily mean an end but a transformation. Its twigs were placed in wooden coffins to accompany the dead on their last journey. Nocturnal alchemists turn its flowers into tinctures that enable communication with ghosts. The most famous wormwood beverage, absinth, is responsible for lucid dreaming (also daydreaming). A beautiful disaster and a rebirth. This is what people prayed for on the Saint John’s Eve while burning woodworm in bonfires high up on mountain tops. Similarly, in Brzeżańska’s works mourning the Earth is filled with new hopes and possibilities: interspecies alliances and fluid identities.

Wormwood, wild willow gathered by the shores of Vistula on the World Rivers Day, and other medicinal plants. For many years, Brzeżańska has been emphasizing the spiritual world of nature and its magic that should be used with respect and reason. The everyday can transform into the eerie, and a lucky charm can become poison. 

Agnieszka Brzeżańska – born in 1972, in Gdańsk. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk and Warsaw in Professor Stefan Gierowski's Painting Studio and at the Tokyo National University of Fine Art and Music on a Japanese Government Scholarship. Her work includes painting, drawing, photography, film, ceramics and other media. Brzeżańska reaches for various registers of knowledge, from physics and philosophy to the systems of cognition marginalised by modern science, such as alchemy, parapsychology, esotericism, indigenous knowledge or matriarchal traditions. Since 2016, together with Ewa Cieplewska, she organizes Flow/Przepływ - an artistic residency on the Vistula River.

She collaborates with the BWA Warszawa gallery and NANZUKA in Tokyo.

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