AWARD CEREMONY & OPENING: MAGDALENA CIEMIERKIEWICZ. RAPESEED: CLAUS MICHALETZ PREIS & KVOST STIPENDIUM 2024

AWARDS CEREMONY – 11/09/2024, 18.00

OPENING – 11/09/2024, 18.00

Borderland: Where do national and cultural identities begin and end? At what point do official and private histories overlap? What is visible and what remains hidden from view?

The starting point for Magdalena Ciemierkiewicz’s works on display at KVOST is her home village of Koniaczów, located in the south-eastern corner of Poland, a historically multi-ethnic and multi-religious populated area close to the Ukrainian border.

After the end of the Second World War, the Ukrainian villagers, neighbors’ with whom Ciemierkiewicz’s grandmother had grown up, were forcibly expelled by the communist government during the Operation Vistula. Their houses were set on fire. Since the beginning of Russia’s attack on Ukraine, Ukrainians have been forced to flee to this region again.

“I deliberately tell the story of my village from the perspective of the third generation,” explains Ciemierkiewicz, ”I want to show how generational woundings continue to this day, especially in the periphery, where the past needs to be worked through even more urgently than in the big cities. I understand my work as part of a new culture of remembrance.”

Some of the works on display reinterpret ethnographic artifacts from the former Ukranian Regional Museum Stryvihor. Founded in 1932 in Przemyśl, just a stone’s throw from her village, the museum contained the most extensive collection of marginalized Ukrainian folk art in the region. During the Soviet occupation, some of the objects were stolen, the rest went to the National Museum in Przemyśl after 1945, where the objects are stored, but still not accessible to the public today. Ciemierkiewicz believes that now, during the ongoing war in Ukraine, is the right time to talk about the visibility of Ukrainians in Poland and shaping a more open culture and state, also on the periphery.

For her exhibition at KVOST, she recreated traditional embroidery motifs on almost 100-year-old linen fabrics that were handwoven by women in the Polish-Ukrainian borderland. The use of textile materials with feminine connotations opens up spiritual perspectives on the idea of community and serves as a deliberate counterpoint to the male-dominated business of war.

The fragility of the textile structures, partly moth-eaten and disintegrating, symbolizes the fragility of a memory that must be constantly maintained. Ciemierkiewicz transfers the fragmentary nature of the historical pieces into her work and creates a new whole from them.

Between 1941 and 1944, the fields around the village of Koniaczów became the scene of indescribable atrocities. Nazis killed thousands of prisoners of war and civilians of different nationalities and, at the end of the war, set up a crematorium, in which their bodies were burned. As a child, the artist roamed these fields without knowing their history. Through acts of remembrance in places where there are no traces of the crimes committed, Ciemierkiewicz reveals new forms of remembrance sensitive to the contemporary context and the intercultural diversity of the victims.

A textile installation made of dark wool symbolizes the fertile farmlands that became silent witnesses to war crimes. The title of the exhibition, RAPESEED, deliberately plays with the ambiguity of the English term, which on the one hand stands for the yellow rape and gives the Ukrainian flag its color alongside the blue of the sky, and on the other hand refers to the horrors of past and present wars.

At a time when nationalist tendencies are on the rise again Ciemierkiewicz shows that cultural identities in the borderland have always been fluid and explores the tradition of trans-national solidarity between all people living in the region.

In collaboration with the Ukrainian artist Diana Sozonova, an installation was created using pysanky, eggshells painted according to traditional Ukrainian motifs, based on models from the archives of the Stryvihor Museum. The pysanky symbolize the liberation of the soil from the rigidity of winter, the coming of spring, new hope and life.

Text by Diana Weis / 2024

Ciemierkiewicz Is this year’s recipient of the KVOST scholarship and the Claus Michaletz Preis 2024, which is endowed with 10,000 euros. The artist was selected from 137 applications.

The exhibition is part of Berlin Art Week / Featured Selection