As the season sets in, we are delighted to announce Agata Madejska is joining Belmacz.


view available works 

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Working internationally since the late 2000s, Agata Madejska explores the subliminal side of seemingly absolute insignia. Delving into the multiple ways in which power can be manifest, Madejska’s practice places spatial formations, communal structures and socio-political systems under tension; questioning the façades of language, architecture, public agreements, as well as other forms that hold associative or symbolic value. Through subversion, and the idea that objects are encoded carriers of potential mis(sed)understandings, Madejska’s conceptual works draw viewers in, engaging us through disguise and deception, unsettling the dividing line between conscious real and subconscious ephemeral. Here, photographs look like graphic renderings (kosmos, 2007), experimental prints recall post-minimalist paintings (DeBeers I, 2017), whilst sculptures (From Now On (Folly), 2014) and installations (Mistakes Were Made, 2018) act with performative gestures. Far from just a formal blurring of arbitrary medium boundaries, this trickery pertains to the instable ground on which institutional ideologies often lay their foundations, exposing how we physically experience images, objects, and spaces. By hollowing out seemingly authoritative ideals, and the material forms that imbue them with dialectical meaning, Madejska poses deeply philosophical questions which demand viewers to think and re-think how we have come to know not only our world but ourselves in this world-space - how and why.
 
Agata Madejska’s method of working uncovers the seemingly (al)chemical processes and ultra-sensations that give weight and ontological corporeality to concrete forms shaping our movements through life. Through post-(and)photographic processes, Madejska captures, crops, and composes the essence of her subject matter, making the seemingly ‘everydayness’ of public space appear somewhat shadowy and sinister. The pairing of conceptual thought and formal process can be seen in works such as Tender Offer (2017), a series of large photographs balancing hostility and vulnerability, alluding to the discrepancies within economic icons, and Technocomplex (2017), a group of experimental light-sensitive objects, that can be read as deformations of architectural giants, or rather fiscal monuments. These estranged series both took as their point of departure The City of London; in this way, they doubly cite the dubiousness of corporate power and the hyper-real deformity of contemporary life.
 
Madejska explores modes of communication, manipulation, as well as the slippages in-between, to question socio-spatial apparatus. This point of dwelling situates her with/in the corollary textures of her subject matter, and through this close examination, enables her to extricate the objects/subjects of her investigations from narrow frames of reference. This disavowal of subsidence from a context and meaning, as well as any wider relational associations, is a line of thought Madejska also pursues through her research into the atrophy of public trust, and the relationships we have with objects as well as our surroundings. In seeking out the molecular essence of her chosen phenomena and re-imaging the grains of life she finds, Madejska makes ‘architectural’ - that is solid, stolid, and seeable – the interrelations and dependencies between images (surfaces), objects (materials) and spaces (bodies).
 
Seemingly evoking the paradoxical morphology of modern political life, Madejska’s work has a liquidus feel: like an early morning smog through which a viewer in Berlin, London, or Warsaw squints to discern what they encroach. Stripped of their crumbling frontages, Madejska’s smooth surfaces implicate viewers, introducing an intimacy that exacerbates the gaps between what we see, how we see and how this mode of seeing is constructed to influence a type of reality attached to modern practices of sovereignty.
 
Reformed otherwise, Madejska subjects unravel as we engage them, alluding to, in turn, the fallacy of permanence foregrounded by dominating agents in our lives. An example of this deeply reflective re-articulation of the signifiers upholding certain ideologies can be seen in Mistakes Were Made (2018-ongoing), an immersive sculptural work bringing together soft hangings, dark oval flooring, and a monotone voice-over. Echoing minimalist sculpture, but through Madejska’s distinctive idiom, the work’s austere grey body, a tone mirrored in the accompanying audio, does not invite immersion as such but demands attention. Sitting with the work, we become aware that the voice-over has a particularly political feel, a re-reading perhaps of some deeply impassioned congressional address. Following this line of thought, the charcoal carpet, central and underfoot, recalls the ornate carpets that have adorned the Oval Office (the seat of U.S. power). Taken together, Mistakes Were Made acts as a pseudo-monument to the ideological fog of modern democratic practice. That is non-descript, stricken, yet highly present.
 
Just as architectural monoliths and public spaces, we humans are subject to and subjected to social and political tremors, re-development, and processes of entropy. Removed from a saturated world, returned and remade with a new design aesthetic, Madejska’s artworks haunt the present, challenging patterns of the past that constitute the structures embodied as known today. This line of thought can be seen in Madejska’s most recent solo exhibition Modified Limited Hangout, at Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven (Wilhelmshaven, Germany) 2018-2019. Bringing together installation, sound, photography, light-sensitive objects, sculptures, and works on paper the artworks gathered here create a microcosm of sorts, or a model for living with greater potentiality. Citing histories of political mobilisation and social renewal, the exhibition becomes a metaphor challenging the ways in which we human beings come to know ourselves as fixed and solid, within public discourses rife with debris.
 
Madejska proposes that in coming to believe the fallacy of our permanence, the horizons beyond our frame of reference become blurred, lost to the forces of time. The spectres that dissociate viewers in Modified Limited Hangout echo Madejska’s two and experimental three-dimensional photographic work, imaging, through installation, a space for associative reflection. Gazing through this mist - of fabric and steel, vinyl and aluminium - the bio-powerful structures that govern our becoming and being in the contemporary world are revealed as nothing more than projections that uphold the perspectives of certain agents. In stripping “human reality” of its “pathos of grandeur” and daring to challenge concrete “post-Enlightenment” perspectives, Madejska introduces productive vulnerability into the exhibition space. This sphere of “ec-static” dispossession is, to use Judith Butler's words, “precisely the one that exposes my unknowingness and the unconscious imprint of my primary sociality.” In this way, Modified Limited Hangout, as with much of Madejska’s work, creates something of a shadowy social space; one that “brings amazing breakthroughs, but that also brings great strain…” (Agata Madejska Mistakes Were Made, 2018-19).
 
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Agata Madejska (*1979 in Warsaw) lives and works in London. Graduated from Folkwang University of the Arts, Essen in 2007 and the Royal College of Art, London in 2010. Selected solo and group exhibitions include Mother Mercury, Art Night, London (2019), Modified Limited Hangout, Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven (2018), Technocomplex, Parrotta Contemporary Art, Stuttgart (2017); Place. Tlomackie 3/5, Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw (2017); Entoptic Screening, Galeria ASP, Warsaw (2016); Johanna Jaeger & Agata Madejska, Kunstraum griffelkunst, Hamburg (2016); Kingly Things, Chandelier Projects, London (2015); Conflict, Time, Photography, Museum Folkwang, Essen, Albertinum Dresden (2015) and Tate Modern, London (2014); Form Norm Folly, Kunstverein Krefeld, Krefeld (2014); Twisted Entities, Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen (2013); Man and his Objects, Museum Folkwang, Essen (2012); Made in Germany Zwei, kestnergesellschaft, Hannover (2012); Menos tiempo que lugar, Palacio National de las Artes, Buenos Aires (2010); reGeneration 2, Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne (2010) and Aperture, New York (2011); Bloomberg New Contemporaries, ICA, London (2010). She was awarded the renowned Contemporary German Photography award by the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen and Halbach Foundation, Essen in 2008 and the Emerging Artist Award of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia in 2011. Madejska has been the recipient of public funding awards in both the UK and Germany.

Jakub Śwircz, 2019.

Judith Butler, 2006. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, p 28.