Decorative Interior Elements
Dominika Olszowy’s exhibition spans four gallery rooms, each functioning as an act, episode, or fragment of her artistic expression. The artist has composed it from both older pieces and completely new works, featuring familiar “protagonists” from her practice who return like actors performing their signature roles.
Theatrical connotations are particularly fitting here. Olszowy – a visual artist who seamlessly combines sculptural media, installation art, video, and performative practices – has been collaborating with the theatre for over twenty years, most recently primarily as a set and costume designer. Already during her secondary-school years she took part in performances by independent theatre groups – Teatr Kreatury (Gorzów Wielkopolski) and Teatr Strefa Ciszy (Poznań) – which likely influenced the distinctly ludic quality of her art, marked by elements of absurdity, as well as the performative components that she often incorporates. The exhibitions she prepares follow a logic reminiscent of theatrical scenography.
Olszowy feels particularly well in collaborative creative work, as evidenced by her aforementioned involvement in theatre. She is also the founder or co-founder of several collective projects: the ephemeral, anti-establishment Sandra gallery and the artistic motorcycle gang Horsefuckers M.C. She also performed with Maria Tobola in Cipedrapskuad, a hip-hop duo through which the two artists challenged mainstream sexist rap.
Art of a distinctly individual character began to predominate in Olszowy’s practice from around 2015, although she has repeatedly expanded her artistic identity to include actresses and performers acting as herself. As she became more deeply engaged in individual work, existential questions grew more pronounced in her practice, with personal experience, intimacy, and mental states becoming central sources of reflection.
Over more than a decade, the artist has developed a distinctive visual language rooted in her individually devised technique, a metaphorical and symbolic aesthetic, and an inherent poetic charge. Her thinking about her own art is shaped by an understanding of reality as a construct with constantly shifting parameters, with imagination and an oneiric mode of expression as key forces driving her creativity. Her installations in gallery spaces are built from sculptures, many of which are everyday objects she is especially drawn to. Once introduced into an artistic context and subjected to transformation, these objects reveal the reverse side of things, disrupt our sense of reality, and provoke unease. This prompts the viewer to engage more attentively with Olszowy’s works, which often disregard the most evident forms of violence and move instead into an oneiric, intuitive realm. Her imagination operates through images, and her sculptures/objects/props give rise to expansive narratives.
Drawing on her penchant for scenic design and theatrical conventionality, Olszowy moves deftly between truth and fabrication in search of the right form to articulate what matters to her. The character of this expression is largely shaped by a poetic quality that has become increasingly pronounced in her work.
Olszowy’s work resists straightforward categorisation; she feels a strong need for creative freedom, reaching for new materials and sources of inspiration, while also deepening certain motifs that recur across her exhibitions. Crises – including everyday ones such as fatigue, burnout, the need for security, helplessness, loss, mourning, and strategies for coping with the experience of death – have shaped her recent practice. These themes also surface in the exhibition Decorative Interior Elements. Among them are subjects of the greatest gravity, yet Olszowy approaches them with lightness – even with ironic humour.
The exhibition is structured around the notion of powerlessness and attempts made to overcome it. Olszowy draws on a rich arsenal of her characteristic artistic means, using them in an effort to address situations that slip beyond control. The four rooms are arranged in a rhythm reminiscent of breathing: inhale–exhale.
The first room, light and spacious, has relatively few exhibits. One can take a breath while listening to a cat reading the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in French, accompanied by an animation on a monitor featuring friendly, purring, furry clouds. The room is illuminated by the warm glow of sunlight caught in a curtain, yet the relatively cosy atmosphere is disturbed by the sight of birds smashed against the windows.
The second room is entirely given over to the installation Waiting for the Rest. Burnout, constant exhaustion, and longing for rest remain pressing themes. Olszowy has created a beige interior inspired by Polish homes at the turn of the century, where a “rest set” of furniture was ubiquitous. Eco-leather sofa-poufs are arranged on flesh-coloured linoleum to evoke the layout of graves in a cemetery. The gallery rooms form an enfilade, and to reach the further part of the exhibition visitors must pass through the beige cemetery. Between the quilted graves stand cups filled with spilt coffee. “It is an ironic and ghastly vision of our reality, in which rest, death, and work merge into one,” the artist said in an interview. Or perhaps this is the cemetery of a home? Ambiguity is the essence of Olszowy’s art. In the cemetery room, visitors are accompanied by music composed especially by Jasia Rabiej – narrative in character and introducing an active component into the installation.
The next room once again allows space to breathe: it is empty, apart from abstract compositions of accumulated coffee stains on the walls. The free arrangement of these decorative coffee formations suggests the illusion of regaining control over life, though in truth it is an attempt to organise something essentially unorganisable. Coffee is a frequent protagonist in Olszowy’s art: spilt across the floor, splashed on the walls, steaming in large and small cups. Coffee as a stimulant that drives the body to work; coffee as a symbol of the frantic pace of the contemporary world; but also as a symbol of social bonds – the ritual of “meeting for a coffee.” The smell of coffee evokes a sense of safety and cosiness, yet it is also a key product of a colonial economy built on exploitation.
The final room is dense, full of activity. Here Olszowy has assembled several installations composed as fragments of different rooms – fragments of interiors. They contain special “decorative elements” – sculptures, objects, but also pieces of wallpaper and carpeting, as well as a screen showing a film. The atmosphere is part fairy tale, part dream-like spectacle, where things take on lives of their own – an ambience present in the exhibition’s other spaces as well. However, the decorative elements are not attractive at all – quite the opposite: what prevails here is an aesthetic of poverty, awkwardness, frailty and incoherence. The objects are unbeautiful yet charming, crafted with a sense of tenderness. Some of them resemble amulets – objects that help us endure, bring calm, and offer protection from misfortune. A clear division exists between the inner world and the outer world, which at times comes knocking at the door. We decorate in order to feel that we have influence over something. If we cannot effectively prevent crises in the outside world, focusing on interiors – both literal and metaphorical – allows us to sustain the illusion of agency within our own surroundings.
- Curator
- Ewa Gorządek
