solo show at Muzeum Tatrzańskie, Galeria Władysława Hasiora in Zakopanem

Text by the curator Julita Dembowska: 

The Tatra Museum was established as a regional institution that was to collect both natural specimens and ethnographic artifacts. Over time, the collection was also joined by works by artists associated with our region.

The collection of folk costumes, which has been developing in our Museum since 1889, is the largest collection of ethnographic exhibits gathered in this institution, it has almost 2,500 items. This year, it became the main character of a series of exhibitions entitled “Lessons from the Collection”. In individual branches of the Tatra Museum, you can find presentations of elements of folk costumes from Podhale, Spisz and Orava. In the Władysław Hasior Gallery, we invite you to get to know this unique resource in a different way.

In March 2023, we invited the artist Małgorzata Markiewicz, who creates works – sculptures – installations from yarn, fabrics, clothes, to cooperate with the Museum. While browsing through publications on folk costumes and studying exhibits in the museum magazine, the artist paid attention to detail and the “physical closeness of raw materials”. She selected several objects that particularly interested her and became the inspiration for the works that you can see in the Władysław Hasior Gallery.

The creative space of the former studio of the Zakopane artist was the workplace of Małgorzata Markiewicz for several months. Objects that refer to the museum collection were created there. Macrame in the form of shreds from highlander scarves hung on the high gallery windows. In one of the corners of the exhibition room, the artist wove a woolen growth decorated with thick fringes resembling those from shepherds’ bags. A wide linen skirt hangs on a wicker frame, on which the artist embroidered fragments of highlander songs. Antique felt hats impregnated with grease became the basis for the creation of an installation – a mountain landscape. Finally, a curtain sewn from leftover linen shows respect for the material, care for its best use.

Małgorzata Markiewicz directs our attention to the relationship between man and nature, but also to the need to learn and explore what was before us. “A close-up look at the collection and using not only the sense of sight, but also touch and smell, is a great opportunity for this. (…) in the present times, Nature and Culture have become inextricably intertwined in great intensity, which has changed the dynamics of this relationship. For this reason, it is necessary to look for new ways of being in the world, based not on domination and colonization, but rather on care and respect. That is why in my work I focus on wool, leather, homespun linen, fat, in the proximity of animals and plants, which does not consist in using them, but in being with them in mutual respect and intertwining.”

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