MASK / MASKA

1995

performance

’In anthropology, the mask, defined by Carl Einstein as immobile ecstasy, can be possessed by the person who puts it on for a magic ritual. The boundary between the subject who seeks a remedy for personal unhappiness in the ceremony and the object which holds their desires becomes blurred. The process of identification is associated with an eruption of inexhaustible energy, with the above-mentioned ecstasy leading to inner purification. Set in the contemporary, Anna Klimczak’s minimalistic performance, while deliberately stripped of ethnic associations, is also driven by the energy of transformation which, however, finds no outlet and leads to the thought that it really is concerned with the very fact of existence, of illustrating the process itself’.

excerpt from Jagna Lewandowska’s text Mask, more:  http://bit.ly/1fgEHG7

translation: Karen Sayce