As part of this year's WARSAW GALLERY WEEKEND, we presented Anna Myszkowiak's solo exhibition entitled ‘With a Splinter on A Hand’, curated by Stach Szabłowski.

Please do not touch the exhibits. At the same time, we would like to warn you that we cannot guarantee
reciprocity on their part. In Anna Myszkowiak's sculptures, what is tangible becomes visible, and what
we see is presented in such a way that we feel it through our skin, under our eyelids, in our spine, through which a shiver passes. The artist's works are created with the intention of violating the viewer's inviolability –they touch the consciousness.

Anna Myszkowiak works with workshop sculpture. She experiments with a wide range of materials – both traditional and taken from everyday life and industry: from wood, paper, plywood, MDF, aluminium and resin, to steel wool. The foundation of her practice is working directly with the material. By undertaking this most fundamental sculptural task, she provides personal, thought-provoking answers.

At the centre of the discourse of classical sculpture was the figure of the artist who, before beginning work, stares at the stone and tries to see the shape hidden within it: a representation, a figurea symbol. Myszkowiak does not seek pure form or raw material for representation in the material. She shapes inanimate materials so that they speak with the language of the body. Bringing out this voice requires both formal craftsmanship and a special kind of radicalism –transforming materials, bending them, sometimes acting in defiance of their physicality. If are an invitation to empathise with matter as if it were a living organism, we must take into account that both pleasure and pain may be involved.

The works selected for the exhibition ‘With a Splinter on A Hand’ do not so much form a narrative as a fragmentary presence. A hand, a tear, a torso, a skeleton. The graphite shadow of an eye hidden behind plywood eyelashes. If these figures were to be assembled into a single image, would they form a self-portrait? Or rather a kind of mirror showing the organism – a figure with which the visitor to the exhibition empathises, as if it were their own reflection? Armour, exoskeleton, prosthesis, mask, costume – these associations are justified in the case of Anna Myszkowiak's works. Looking at the artist's sculptures is like putting on and trying out experiences that defy words but remain fundamental to the ways in which a sentient being experiences its physical existence in the world.

Long before artificial intelligence began to speak with a human voice, proponents of the phenomenological theory of consciousness argued that it is inextricably linked to the body; our being-in-the-world is an embodied experience. Myszkowiak's art seems close to this view. In a world of increasingly intelligent technologies, it is not the soul, but the body that begins to distinguish a conscious being from a machine. From this perspective, the physicality of Anna Myszkowiak appears as a privileged language that allows this difference to be expressed.

The artist approaches the viewer with a splinter in her hand. "I imagine this gesture as looking at a piece of wood that was stuck in the body a moment ago," says Myszkowiak, adding that coming with a splinter in your hand can be seen in terms of externalising yourself in front of another person. In this sense, it is a very personal gift – and at the same time a dangerous one. The splinter removed from under the skin is disarmed, it becomes a piece of matter, but it can cut you again. Such a splinter can also stick deep in your memory. It is an invitation to step outside your comfort zone – to a place where consciousness meets the world through the body. It is an area where the distinction between pleasure and pain, caress and injury is blurred – and where life pulsates with its ambivalence, strength, fragility, fear and desire.

Stach Szabłowski