Milk Teeth

Milk Teeth

opening: January 17th, 2014

Witches’ Tower, 5.00 p.m.
Słupsk, al. F. Nullo 8

Small Gallery, 6.00 p.m.
Słupsk, st. Partyzantów 31a

 

the exhibition will be open till February 28th, 2014

 

Allegedly, dreams about teeth falling out are rather bad signs. They are to herald a change, a loss, illness or bad luck for the dreaming one. However, there’s nothing unnatural in the falling out of teeth, especially in case of milk teeth which at first become loose when pressurized by the tongue, than hanging only on some thin strings, and in the end letting to be pulled out with one decisive move. It’s inevitable, even if you do care for your teeth, avoiding sweets and often brushing them. Although they have neither the charm of animal fangs nor the big dimensions of adult teeth, they can be kept till death as a precious, even if a bit disgusting treasure, an old worn part of oneself. They are, in fact, inconspicuous, little and decayed. In turn, when you still have milk teeth, the world seems to be more picturesque, expansive, and dangerous. In children’s boredom which is not disturbed by anything serious often for the last time, there is a room for deep considerations and analyses. It’s a kind of hypersensitivity.

Contrary to western European countries, in Poland children whose teeth are falling out are not visited by any good teeth witch. So she doesn’t leave them any tiny gift under the pillow, swapping for this ambiguous trophy. There isn’t any figure that could tame this process which heralds the definitive change of the body. Every child has to work out this ritual of passage on its own. Milk teeth fall out, leaving for a few months dark ugly holes in their place.

For the exhibition Milk Teeth twelve artists have prepared their pictures, drawings, objects, installations, video and other things which could be defined as gibberish, patchy, and incomplete. Complex anecdotes and contexts have accompanied their coming into being, thus ultimately enforcing the viewer to return temporarily to the state of enhanced attention associated with childhood.

In their works, the artists recall old stories and individual mythologies. The engineering of these mostly fictitious memories remains hidden. Nobody knows why just they become worthy of dusting off and revisiting, deprived of their ghost status for the duration of the exhibition.

Working on the Milk Teeth, in the beginning with distance and then with greater and greater enthusiasm, the artists leaf through memoirs, tear off yellowed wall-papers, ask relatives, and review the sketches of their forgotten works that have been lying at the bottom of their drawers, failed and broken. They dig for their forgotten experiences and ideas which are not put in order, often doomed to oblivion and loss, and provisional. Having been rediscovered, a part of them appear to be sloppy, misshapen and a bit awkward.

With its arrangement the exhibition refers to a junk shop or an attic that generates a specific gravitational field of forgotten things. It has been designed to function as a ruin, an excavation discovered by archaeologists or a space resembling the spongy structure of memory, full of cracks and fissures, mistakes and repetitions, which should be completed with own senses. And as a place tempting with the promise of unpunished sinking into not own (nobody’s) past.

 

Curator: Marta Lisok

Participants:

Daria Malicka

Natalia Bażowska

Szymon Szewczyk

Bartek Buczek

Adam Laska

Michał Smandek

Michał Gayer

Dominik Ritszel

Bartosz Kokosiński

Erwina Ziomkowska

Monika Szwed