Galeria FF - Jakub Karwowski

Sentimental Fiction

It is not reality.
It is fiction, although plausible.
Based on how a person and his or her surroundings look in a given situation.
Not a document, not a diary, not a blog.
Credible fiction.
Illusion which helps to order thoughts and describe the environs.
Self-therapy?
Perhaps simply a family album, since it is always a personal fiction.

***

What is going to become of a deliberately assembled family album which at the same time was trying to investigate current haunting problems? What does such a form demand?
The need to modify reality, to thicken the time and the situation, to stage things, to create a certain fiction or the illusion of fiction which will make it easier to speak of one's own reality.
What is this own, personal reality?
It is an image that simultaneously generates memory and determines what one would like to remember. It is also an ordinary snapshot or a family picture, as well as an after-image and deja-vu.
It is both an account and reminiscence.
Sensitivity to images that are already familiar, that once appeared somewhere before our eyes - eyes conscious or unconscious of what they were seeing.
These images are scenes from movies we have seen, which are put together yet again from the surrounding elements by force of inertia. It is a state in which one wants to build an absolute monarchy of the image and cut oneself off from the non-ideal.
To live in this fiction, tangling it up with the form of a family album, framing it and hanging on a hook.

***

What is a family album without people who can identify the photographs it contains? An album without signatures, names, dates, names of places and the whole context which made it function as a collection of memories of a family? What is left of it when it is handled by someone to whom it was not addressed? What becomes of the reading of only the visual layer which is usually of secondary importance during the selection and choosing of the photographs for the album? What does the narrative springing from the sequence of the pictures, scenes, portraits and views speak about? Is it somehow related to the original intention of the author or is it completely at odds with it? Is another, partly reverse situation, possible, a situation in which the photograph without knowledge, consciousness and the will of the artist illustrates the synthesis of the future fate of those who appear in the photograph, the synthesis expressed precisely by means of the meanings and contents of the purely visual layer?
Is it possible to displace memories by the photographs that were taken at the very same time? Can one have a memory consisting only of photographed images, i.e. can one have a memory consisting of photographs only?

***

Sentimental Fiction is a two-part series.
Each part comes from different places, times and spaces.
Both parts have to do with the sphere of a family album, of the personal narrative of my closest environment.
They came into being with different intentions but ultimately one is, in a certain way, the result of the other.
The first part as an introduction is, on the one hand, the broadening of the context and the introduction into the subject of my personal settling of accounts with family photography, while on the other hand - it is a source I found of my own little photographic family tradition of which I had been almost completely unaware.

Black-and-white photographs taken by my grandfather, some of them skillfully coloured, have been taken from an old family album where they presented a world long gone, seen through the eyes of the author. They are deliberately shown without any other context than the visual background of each of the pictures. The story behind these photographs, whatever they were supposed to show and whoever is in them, has been made voiceless. Equally voiceless is the video work showing the author of the photographs looking at the pictures from the album, recounting the intentions and the setting in which they were produced. This trick is supposed both to highlight the role of the meaning that the author attributed to those photographs and to stress that what is more important is not what the story is but the fact that there always is a story attributed to them. This whole part focuses exactly on what those photographs can be without such a story.

Jakub Karwowski