Lingering Reference Image

The series of photographs by Elżbieta Jabłońska presents men and women in kitchens performing everyday duties: preparing meals, reaching into cupboards for kitchen utensils, or washing dishes. The identity of the protagonists of the photographs – who are, as sources report, artists, critics and curators professionally connected to the world of art – is not known to the viewer since they stand with their backs to the camera, busy with their duties. In the background, there are kitchen interiors with their everyday equipment, either tidied up or in a mess. The cycle is closely related to the main interest in Elżbieta Jabłońska’s work: using a range of artistic disciplines – photography, performance, and installation – the artist documents the banal and prosaic nature of some aspects of reality. The projects are accompanied by commentary on the roles ascribed to specific social or professional groups. The perverse, humorous playing with stereotypes most frequently takes place in the kitchen, which is turned into a stage where a peculiar ritual is enacted, in which the obviousness and repetitiveness of the performed actions is linked with duty, or even with a mission. Though it is not a designation that fully exhausts the potential of the artist’s work, feminist discourse does play a significant role in it. It is easily recognizable in the famous series of three self-portraits, Supermother (2002), which presents the artist and her son wearing the costumes of his favourite heroes. Mythologizing the virtues of maternity, Elżbieta Jabłońska reaches the limits of ridicule, giving herself a heroic status straight from comic strips and adventure films. [F. Pregowski]

The series of photographs by Elżbieta Jabłońska presents men and women in kitchens performing everyday duties: preparing meals, reaching into cupboards for kitchen utensils, or washing dishes. The identity of the protagonists of the photographs – who are, as sources report, artists, critics and curators professionally connected to the world of art – is not known to the viewer since they stand with their backs to the camera, busy with their duties. In the background, there are kitchen interiors with their everyday equipment, either tidied up or in a mess. The cycle is closely related to the main interest in Elżbieta Jabłońska’s work: using a range of artistic disciplines – photography, performance, and installation – the artist documents the banal and prosaic nature of some aspects of reality. The projects are accompanied by commentary on the roles ascribed to specific social or professional groups. The perverse, humorous playing with stereotypes most frequently takes place in the kitchen, which is turned into a stage where a peculiar ritual is enacted, in which the obviousness and repetitiveness of the performed actions is linked with duty, or even with a mission. Though it is not a designation that fully exhausts the potential of the artist’s work, feminist discourse does play a significant role in it. It is easily recognizable in the famous series of three self-portraits, Supermother (2002), which presents the artist and her son wearing the costumes of his favourite heroes. Mythologizing the virtues of maternity, Elżbieta Jabłońska reaches the limits of ridicule, giving herself a heroic status straight from comic strips and adventure films.
The cycle titled Lingering also uses myths, but this time those attached to representatives of the cultural elite and social avant-garde, who, surreptitiously portrayed in the kitchen, are domesticated, unmasked, and de-contextualized with respect to status. Elżbieta Jabłońska’s works are characterized by altruism of sorts, visible in, for example, her preparation of exquisite hors-d’oeuvres for the gallery audience (Through the stomach to the heart, 2001), or the installation Kitchen (2009) – a complement, as it were, to Lingering – whose oversized kitchen furniture fills the space of “Studio+Kitchen” in CoCA. Jabłońska’s “kitchen problematics” has been enriched here by the functional value in a work of art that is to provide space for informal meetings of visitors to CoCA.
Similarly to other works by Elżbieta Jabłońska, Lingering belongs to the rich tradition of critical art, while the artist’s humour and exploitation of banality recall the artistic actions of the Azorro group. [F. Pregowski]