Exhibition: Magdalena Tryba "Pockets Full of Stones" / Performance: Kyrillos Aleksandrov "PAPRYGUNCZIK " (2024)

PAPRYGUNCZIK is a performance accompanying the exhibition "Pockets Full of Stones" by Magdalena Tryba.

My intervention consisted of throwing a rubber ball—this is my personal impression of Magdalena Tryba's exhibition. There is a lot of hazard, improvisation, excitement, and cheerfulness (or joie de vivre) in her practice, similar to the trajectory of a ball.

About the exhibition:
When the artist's studio itself becomes a singularity, a kind of unexplained desire, the creative process begins to follow its own direction. The room, the window, the working table transform into a space of collecting—a space that in itself becomes a creative problem. A thing to be found.

The titular phrase “Pockets Full of Stones” is a metaphor for the process of collecting, which, repeated multiple times, transforms each time into a separate journey in search of new places, people, and the stories associated with them. In the work of Magdalena Tryba, emphasis is placed on the gesture of collecting and the underlying need for the constant search for form. By doing so, the artist moves away from the objects themselves understood as found objects. This is because colorful nurdles, the small skeleton of a plastic fish drifting in the sea, or microscopic items – as waste – mean very little.

Following the thought of Eliot Weinberger: “(…) flowers must have butterflies, mountains streams, rocks moss, oceans seaweed, old trees lianas and vines, and people – obsessions” – will Tryba's creative process become clearer to us? Is the declaration of mindfulness contained within it capable of transporting us to the worlds of micro-histories of people and things that the artist has found? Although objects constantly change their shapes, disappear, and others take their place, the old saying suggests that “nothing perishes in nature.” What we are truly dealing with is a continuous process of object migration. This migration, in the artist's exhibition, takes the form of an artistic installation striving to respond to the encountered problem of space.

Curator: Adriana Markowska
Documentation: Jakub Szachnowski