2-3 October 2010

A mixed media installation created as a reaction to a series of trips back to Poland. The layered process of unearthing family history, the trauma of war, collective memory . . . digging deeper and deeper through layers of time . . .

Sometimes our parents and grandparents keep stories from the past hidden, sparing us details on certain subjects . . . perhaps as a way to shelter us, so that the weight of the past doesn’t stop us from being free and happy, from moving forward. The freedom that comes with not knowing too much.

Yet curiosity is natural and wants to uncover the truth – it wants to know all the details, about events that were never granted closure. And before you know it, it’s too late. You have embarked on an impossible mission, revisiting something that perhaps should have been left alone.

You start to dig a hole, but it only keeps getting deeper and deeper, and suddenly you are submerged waist-high in it, soon about to lose sight of the horizon. And you realize you might never reach the bottom, because there might never be answers. The unspeakable, even unconceivable, gets heavier and heavier with lack of information, as the imagination tries to fill in the missing piecs of information, the gaps . . .

Are some things better left behind, skeletons undisturbed in the closet? Or is it wrong to forget about the past? At what point and with which new generation does collective memory die, and who decides when?

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Location: Polish Combattant Hall, Toronto

Part of "Concurrence III" exhibition organized by Art Initiatives

Toronto Scotiabank Nuit Blanche

Materials: photographs, wooden clothespegs, branches, soil, twine, metal mesh, other objects