PRZESZŁOŚĆ TO OBCY KRAJ 
THE PAST IS A STRANGE COUNTRY

02.04 / 02.07.2023
CERVANTES INSTITUTE
WARSAW
POLAND

PHOTOS: WOJCIECH ROZENEK 

Monographic exhibition of Elián Stolarsky whose work is the product of a constant investigation (or personal-emotional search) in which the artist is related to her generational history, linked from multiple moments that she considers her own: with her country of birth, Uruguay, and with the origin of their immigrant relatives (Poles, Turks, Sephardim). The title is taken from the work of the American historian and geographer David Lowenthal.

The exhibition goes through the theme of identity narrative, and the creation of a personal voice as a possible form of integration and relationship with the other. It is through a reworking of her family history and a specific context that the artist weaves together her own fiction to understand where she comes from, where she wants to go, and what her place in the world is, choosing at all times the setting to which she has decided to get on.

The artist will present works specially prepared for this occasion and that are the result of her working visit to Warsaw in 2022. Being the winner of the award in the artist residency program in Matadero (Madrid), the Instituto Cervantes in Madrid which has granted the freedom to choose the destination and the center where she could hold the exhibition, and it is on that occasion that Stolarsky decides to collaborate with the Instituto Cervantes in Warsaw, visiting the country of his ancestors for the first time.

Ewa Milena Mazur

A strange country, as if it were after a catastrophe or simply ruins since there is neither before, nor during, nor after. Where all its inhabitants are artists, where time is suspended. Where life happens among ruins, debris and ghosts. Children are children who do not grow, do not age. They inhabit the collapsed streets, it is neither cold nor hot. Strange Country is a place in memory with different scenarios, where simple shapes represent complex, distant, blurry events. Where the present is a kind of prowling dance, where the past is the smell of objects.

“Obcy kraj” is nothing more and nothing less than a landscape of memory, eternal, melancholic and happy, blurred. A phoneme, a phrase in another language that echoes when there are moments of silence and rainy days.

This exhibition is a sketch for a play that has already happened or will happen (that does not really matters). It happens in three acts, its characters that start from unknown relatives, from memories of artists from the last century, from anonymous archive photographs, live frozen in a city that is none and is all the cities that were destroyed and bombed at the same time. All of them are survivors and that's what the plot is about. The work is about memory or the lack of it, about how to live after a traumatic event.

The songs are mixed, the techniques are mixed. There are curtains that invite the viewer to walk through them. There are faces with their own light, there are shadows, ghosts, there are houses, corridors, neighborhoods, synagogues. There are words. Because yes, there are still words and stories that deserve to be told.

Special thanks to: Ewa Milen Mazur, José Luis Perales García, Abel Murcia, Ane Rodríguez Armendariz, María José Magaña Clemente, Graciela Varela, Sara Cynowicz, Walter Stolarsky. 

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