Antonina Jasińska

Featuring in the exhibition as an invited guest, ANTONINA JASIŃSKA has collaborated with the C+S art collective at numerous events. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków with a specialization in graphic design. Despite her relative youth, she has already enjoyed a successful career as the creative director and designer of Mill Studio in Kraków, where she is responsible for web design, formulating design systems, designing book and magazine covers and comprehensive programs of visual identity. She is a recent winner of the prestigious Red Dot Design Award, and she currently works as an assistant professor at the UKEN Institute of Art and Design in Kraków, where she teaches graphic design and visual communication design at the Department of Media Art. In her free-lance work, she specializes in watercolours and collage; her work has been exhibited both in Poland and abroad, and she is a member of Die Neuen Milben international art collective.

She has contributed a series of seven collages to the exhibition (Unspoken; Behind Closed Doors; Tell Me What You Feel; Everyday Temptations; Like a Stone; We will never see each other again; Murder) in which she addresses the relationships between men in women in an uninhibited and fearless fashion. She is unafraid to disrupt aesthetic norms – her work challenges the viewer, forcing them to look beneath the surface, past the glossy depictions of love found in the mass media. She contrasts appealing visuals with uncompromising content, generating a tension which compels us towards (self) reflection.

The artist sees her work as being “about a (love) bond which, in its essence, should form a symbiosis and provide mutual benefit and thus shift in form depending on the situation. Intimacy can transform into enmity, desire into obsession… Only when love lacks trust does it start to become painful. But this is still not parasitism (which is also a form of symbiosis), but instead a bond which takes on many different aspects – sometimes tender and romantic, at other times dark and harsh. While working on these collages, I was reaching out to the darker side of human nature, the aspect that we typically keep hidden from the surrounding world. The collages are contrasted with images from magazines and social media (which have been deliberately idealized, edited, distorted and exaggerated) in order to demonstrate the other, more painful aspects of a relationship: a ‘symbiosis’ that inflicts harm instead of providing comfort”. 

The featured collages are suggestive short stories that pack a concentrated punch. The artist has a close relationship with the medium of the collage, and she has developed a distinctive cultivated style. She used fragments of the real world – clippings, textures, symbols – to create layered compositions which oscillate between beauty and pain. Every image is a confession, a crying out; but at the same time, it is a calm reflection on what it means to be in a relationship, to be a woman, to be vulnerable. These are works in which we can feel and read a relationship in all its depth. Relationships are cruel, enticing, yet at the same time disturbing and even repulsive. They are visual echoes of the emotional turbulence which intense relationships leave in their wake, a deep psychological dive into the dynamics of intimacy. The sensitivity and also the courage of Jasińska’s approach speaks to the viewer in a fundamental level, inviting them to undergo an introspective journey: not only into the inner world of the artist but into that which lies at the core of each and every one of us.

Edita Vološčuková, project curator