Art

Wish Landscapes
Organized by Kasia Sobucka
Featuring Katarzyna Perlak

Young Curators, New Ideas V
July 17 – 21, 2019
Trumbull and Porter Hotel Detroit
Courtesy of Detroit Art Week

Photography Paul-David Rearick

Politics and feelings have been a driving force behind the development of Katarzyna Perlak’s practice. She’s most influenced by her experiences as a woman, queer, Eastern European and an immigrant. The starting point for her work is often autobiographical, which she then expands into intersubjective dialogues, tapping into ideas of desires and shared vulnerabilities, collective memory and history and asks what the tradition is, whom does it belong to and how can it be reclaimed by those that are marginalized within it?

While continuously revisiting hope, affect, helplessness and strategies of coping with situations of crisis – political or personal – Katarzyna’s works have become increasingly engaged with text and semantics. She investigates the epistemological transference from ‘utopian visions’ to ‘utopian feelings’ and consequently the shift from the spatially oriented notions of utopia to those that are time oriented and based in ‘utopian experiences’. 

Wish Landscapes will explore experiences of exhaustion and hope and deal with the subjects of migration and belonging through the portrayal and representation of stories and experiences. Wish Landscapes takes its title from Ernst Bloch’s definition of the relationship between contemporary notions of utopia, hope and horizon.

Detroit Art Week