SPIRIT ANATOMY

Solo exhibition
BWA Ostrowiec , Poland
Curated by Goschka Gawlik

13.04.2024 – 21.06.2024

“At the Spirit Anatomy exhibition, Jósefina Alanko, born in Finland in 1993, will present post-media variations on traditional painting, which constitute the most recognisable element of her award-winning work. Objects and textile installations will also be featured. The artist has prepared two of these specifically for the BWA space in Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski. The exhibition’s title, Spirit Anatomy, suggests a synthesis of ‘spirit’, referring to supernatural power, and ‘anatomy’, indicating physicality and corporeality, especially as perceived rationally from a scientific perspective. The phrase Spirit Anatomy reflects the artist’s complex worldview, in which she processes personal experiences alongside clichés from cultural memory, records of female experiences alongside visions of queer beauty, and traditional cosmologies alongside scientific assertions about the environment or genetics.

At the exhibition, the artist will present a comprehensive vision of her feminine cosmos using luminous, levitating forms. Visitors will have the opportunity to experience the artist’s diverse works, both materially and formally, as they traverse through the three pictorial sequences of the exhibition, each differing in atmosphere, meaning, and poetics. In the first sequence, located right at the entrance, large-format canvases will dominate, accompanied by imaginings drawn from the magic and forgotten rituals of Karelia, a region in northern Finland. The middle section will encompass various constellations of objects reminiscent of unidentified bodies in planetary space. Meanwhile, the third section, constructed with semi-transparent black partitions with ‘holes’, will be characterized by a sensual play with the presence and absence of bodies and the desires they arouse, which could be analyzed in the spirit of Lacanian psychoanalysis. The tripartite dramaturgy of the exhibition will mirror the artist’s cognitive priorities, unveiling both her unique – even peculiar – sensitivity and her awareness of the ‘spirit of the times’ and ongoing discussions surrounding feminism, coloniality, as well as planetary technologies and space conquest.

Jósefina Alanko works with natural materials – textiles, pigments and raw linen canvas. These are systematically transformed in her artistic practice. In her search for new, abstract incarnations of these materials, Alanko draws inspiration from the matriarchal roots of Finnish culture, which are firmly rooted in the artist’s native Karelia. Importantly, however, it is not the primordial Finnish mother goddess that plays a central role in the exhibition, but rather the human body as it is experienced today – although, in Alanko’s art, it is only the skin that, to an extent, peeps through the shell.”
Text: Goshka Gawlik