Zone Out
Zone Out is a series of minimalist photographic self-portraits developed from movement-research-based micro-performances. The cycle explores aspects of fiction, the potentiality of events, and the creation of the imaginative sphere through a hierarchical reversal of functional, everyday gestures and objects. The works show an assortment of ambiguous actions undertaken by the artist within the familiar domestic space – creating a safe space in response to the worldwide experience of anxiety, jeopardy, mental overload, withdrawal and suspension during the pandemic. The series is maintained in a semi-oneiric atmosphere and array of white tones, speaking to classical marble sculpture, and the aesthetics of writing and sign, which together become the narrative body. It also stems from the artist’s childhood experience of entering the mist – the simultaneous soothing and blurring of reality, poetic and evocative feeling of being in an unlimited white space – which has influenced the ethereal, illusory form of the work and the creation of a comfort zone contrasting the globally-felt endangerment and isolation.
Małgorzata Dawidek (PhD) is a visual artist and researcher. In her cross-disciplinary artistic practice, she combines performance, photography, text and academic work, investigating the relationships between the condition of the human body and discursive language and the narratives and representations of vulnerability, anxiety, illness, pain and loss in the context of the politics of identity and diversity. Working between art, literature and medical humanities, Dawidek develops her original concepts of bodygraphy and affective artistic practice creating potentially positive categories in the field of boundary experiences.