It is not a gift given. It is not support, location, referent, or source of sustainability for discourse. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it. The past and the future are iteratively reconfigured and enfolded, and simultaneously difficult to untangle one from another. It is not immutable or passive. It does not refer to a fixed substance; not a thing, but a doing, a congealing of agency. It gets absorbed into the biome for recycling as new flora and fauna. Decentered being humiliated by ecology – material entanglements enfolded and threaded through. It deserves our imaginative capacities and transcends iconography.
Reconfigured and sent out into the world again, it does not require the mark of a force like culture or history to complete it. In the boat moved by magic over the great deep, the traveller lay looking up into the dark. All her life she had looked into the dark; but this was a vaster darkness, this night on the ocean. *
“Not a gift given, but a choice made” is an immersive installation created on the basis of interplay of three seemingly independent planes: visual, textual and sound. Each of them, establishing its own contexts, influences the others. For this project, Inside Job invited Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, founders of the Young Girl Reading Group, to work on the text layer. The sound is made by Panayiotis Mina, an artist from Cyprus cooperating with the Honest Electronics DIT group. The title of the installation was taken from Ursula K. Le Guin’s book “Tombs of Atuan” and concerns the relationship between the visions of the future, understood as a source of new mythology, and the present.
*fragment of the reader prepared especially for the exhibition by Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė.
Sound: Panayiotis Mina
Not a gift given, but a choice made
Inside Job (Ula Lucińska, Michał Knychaus) in collaboration with Dorota Gawęda, Eglė Kulbokaitė and Panayiotis Mina
Pawilon, Poznań, Poland
24.04.2019 – 04.05.2019
Photos: Panayiotis Mina