Creating oneself again. Identity change in contemporary artists` activities
Zuzanna Sokołowska
Amor Fati
March volume, 1 (7)/2017
ISSN: 2449 - 7819
One only needs to recall the Body Memory exhibition at the MCCA Elektrownia Radom in 2012, whose author was the performer Agnes Janich. The artist's body is her main tool. Janich refers to traumas, the past, especially to World War II, to cruelty, degradation and destruction. She treats her own physicality as a memory reservoir, a reservoir she deems necessary to be stimulated and preserved. Janich crosses borders of own physicality in her brutal, challenging to perceive performances, which become a kind of spectacle where her body suffers the most. One of her most important projects is I Hate My Body When You're Gone, made of videos and photos about self-mutilation. The artist seems to derive great pleasure from the painful intervention into her own bodily space. Her shrill screams, accelerated breath, attempts to induce vomiting, hurting her toes with knife, kneading of her breast so strong that it can generate substantial pain - this is a secret, almost spiritualist session, which Janich affords the viewers, trying to summon the one who is gone, and gone forever. Her reactions resemble the violent, nervous movements of a hare, mesmerized by dazzling headlights - trembling, chaotic, nervous and lost.
Janich's behavior is a punishment she levies on her body for the fact of someone leaving her. It is also a clear cry for attention. Her physicality becomes a repository of memory that is difficult to accept and tame, because it carries the traces of the presence of another human being, his closeness, his scent and his touch.
The body becomes an overwhelming burden to her, one she cannot handle. Janich is trying to find an answer to the question about who she is when her loved one is no longer there. She breaks through the layers of her own body, uncovering her identity and wondering to what extent has it been shaped by herself, and to what extent by the people whom she lost.
https://ownetic.com/wydarzenia/2012/10/agnes-janich-body-memory-mcsw-elektrownia-radom/