From the series 'It's hard to defeat the dragon but we need to struggle anyway', 2016

In the new series of works, Irena Kalicka continues her project initiated in 2015, titled Kon jaki jest, kazdy widzi (English: Everyone Can See What the Horse is Like). In the staged photographs, she illustrates the 18th-century vision of the world described in priest Chmielowski’s Nowe Ateny (English: New Athens). The artist has reached for a work filled with superstitions and prejudices but also known as the first Polish encyclopaedia, and perversely accumulates stereotypes and plays with common associations. She enlivens the imagination aroused by the phantasms as she stages the medieval motif of dance macabre performed by frisky, white and red football fans. Just like in earlier works, the artist combines the extravagance of odd figures and wanton behaviour with various cultural codes and references to old and contemporary art. Reading Nowe Ateny, Kalicka does not follow the genealogy of the provided leads - dance macabre or ars moriendi are acted by characters who introduce contemporary narrations into those performances. The book, several centuries old and created to explain the world, is a source of topics on which we can reflect from the perspectives of contemporary culture, visual art, and popular culture, with the use of images which, like colloquial language, absorb the rhetoric of the postcolonial discourse, gender studies, queer theory, and the increasingly visible narrations of nationalism, sex, and racism. National ressentiments assume a grotesque form in the photograph with a hussar woman with fishnet stockings and overdone make-up, the pride of the republic in a queer masquerade costume' (BOZENA CZUBAK). The presented work shows the motif of dance macabre, staged in a manner adapted to our times. The characters, wearing patriotic clothes, are reminiscent of football supporters. Instead of musical instruments, the characters are holding bones which imitate the guitar, trumpet, or percussion. Their faces are covered with masks of the dead. Their costumes hide their individual features and make them look similar, which imposes upon us a certain generalisation which, however, is not allowed by the artist.

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- To this lot we apply 'artist's resale right' ('droit de suite') fee. Royalties are calculated using a sliding scale of percentages of the hammer price.