Solo show at Miejsce Projektów Zachęty, Warsaw 

https://zacheta.art.pl/pl/wystawy/malgorzata-markiewicz-pimoa-chthulu

Grandmas Spiders – portraits 

photo:Michał Łuczak and “Pimoa Chthulu” – hand crocheted black object

Pimoa Chthulu is a project prepared especially for the exhibition at the Zachęta Project Room. The main part of the exhibition is a large-scale object made of black sheep’s wool — resembling a spider web, an octopus or human bodies joined together. The sculpture was made using crochet techniques by the artist and women of different ages and from different localities, acting as the Spider Grandmother. Collaboration with other artists or craftspeople in the creation of projects is another distinguishing feature of Małgorzata Markiewicz’s creative method. (Her earlier works already featured the theme of invisible women’s work or work as a social value that brings income and self-reliance). This time, the artist’s Facebook ad was answered by pensioners, women looking for employment, often in difficult life situations. The artist treats them as partners, not anonymous subcontractors. This is evidenced by the fact that portraits of all the project participants (including Małgorzata Markiewicz Pimoa Chthulu the author) with oversized crochet hooks under their arms, taken using the black and-white photography technique, occupy an important place in the exhibition. The author of the photographs is Michał Łuczak. I hope that the fees for their work have helped the budgets of the ‘spiders’, and that the collaboration on the artistic project has allowed them to taste the joy of creation, at least for a while.(…)

Pimoa Chthulu is the name of the leading fictional spider figure in Donna J. Haraway’s philosophy, a modified version of the taxonomic name of the actually existing Pimoa cthulhu spider living in California, [which] comes from the language of the indigenous Goshute people of Utah: Pimoa — big legs, Cthulhu — akin to the powers of Chaos. In Haraway’s modified second part ‘chthulu’ is derived from the word ‘chthonic’, meaning coming from the subterranean world powering all that lives. The Chthulucene (another term from Haraway’s philosophy) is the era in which we now live, in which it will be crucial to our survival to seek connections and relationships with non-human beings and plants, that is, to look for ‘relatives’ not necessarily among humans. . . . Pimoa Chthulu contains the entire subterranean world giving life to what is above it, feeding fungi, plants, animals and humans, which is built on the principle of connections. Everything is connected to something, and that something is connected to something else. And death and life happen within these connections.