Aleksandra Ciapka

Kryjówka / Hideout, 2015

installation

yard at 13 II Wolności 13 Street

 

The hideout is a tent made from a singular material – shopping bags. Like Russian dolls, it hides within repeatable forms that, through the piling up of one layer on another, have been deprived of their original function. The hideout has become an impossible tent, a dummy. The idea of a hideout is associated with a sense of threat. The artist does not define where it springs from or who the potential users of the hideout may be. Instead, using recognisable forms and materials, she constructs a web of meanings that spans military reality and the area of the market. The hideout has become both the boundary, a place closely watched, and a place appropriated by concrete communities. The light placed inside it subtly hints at the lighthouse, as well as symbolising a presence that inhabits within.

The artist plays with the idea of camouflage and demystifies it, suggesting that the price of invisibility is exclusion. The placing of Hideout within the residential quarter builds additional tension at the juncture of the private and intimate with the alien and the detached. The work raises the themes of partisan strategies for survival and the management of space as well as the transience of life.

Aleksandra Ciapka (b. 1990) – lives and works in Gdańsk. A graduate of Interior Design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, where she is now studying Cultural Animation. She works with costumes, elements of fashion and in particular stage design. She also makes installations, in which she employs her stage design experience. She works closely with alternative theatres in the Tricity. Her works could be seen during Warsaw Fashion Street, in a number of editions of Shakespeare Festival in the OFF sections and also at NARRACJE 2013.