Solo exhibition Drift at Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix
Magda Stawarska presents one of her most ambitious solo presentations to date, showcasing ten new works across various media. Split across the gallery’s upper and lower floor, taking the form of two distinct installations, Drift presents viewers with a spellbinding view of the visual rhythms that constitute the ebb and flow of various cityscapes. Through painting and photography; etching, silkscreen print and slide projection, Stawarska reveals how one fashions a personal relationship to place—layering histories of memory and movement, absence and restitution via patterns that wrap horizontally and vertically across the gallery walls.
Drift builds upon Stawarska’s signature artistic approach—of self-exploring cities, allowing herself to get lost, only to return—a practice akin to that of flaneur. Often accompanied on these journeys with discreet recording equipment; the recordings are adapted, shared with select listeners, annotated, and re-exposed to the world in multi-layered form, revealing the contradictions within the geo-politics of a given urban sphere. What exists in the interstices? This process of revelation is what Stawarska calls the act of “inner listening”.
On the ground floor, Stawarska presents works that are largely inspired by the maritime hues, the abundant humidity, and air of a coastal city that evokes memories of an Andalucía. Here, dreams unfold as a horizontal line, in various shades of blue, green and lilac extends across the four walls of the gallery, punctuated by large paintings and small monochrome prints. A triptych, Found Boat, Lost Memory, 2024, hand painted over a silkscreen print, leans against the longest wall. Playing with scale and placement, Stawarska invites the viewer weave and observe from multiple sightlines as their eyes linger across long stretches of coloured paper to small, postcard-like images. Pause for breath, and look up, and one will find paper cascading from the ceiling to the floor—agile, robust, permanent.
Speaking of Stawarska’s work, the artist, author and curator, Dr. Omar Kholeif, Senior Curator and Director of Collections, Sharjah Art Foundation, recently noted, “Everything that I know about paper I learned from Magda. I have spent years trailing in her footsteps—in print rooms and dark rooms, and back into print rooms through to installing onto gallery walls. What I have learned is that the paper presents a kind of boundless possibility—it listens, feels, responds, unlike any other medium”.
An abandoned fishing boat, Some Boats Wait Forever 2024 sits in juxtaposition to the tiny photo-etchings of fishing baskets, which serve as both as vessels of confinement and protection.
This play with multiple cityscapes continues downstairs. The film, which visually takes place in Łódź and sonically in Bologna and Pisa, revolves around a paired conversation with the painting of torn tarpaulin in Venice. This scene interleaves with a slide projection of shop carts and stalls, wrapped in fabric on an city street in Sharjah, UAE. Deploying her aforemtnioned process of ‘inner listening’, Stawarska invited local researcher and architect, Souraya Kreidieh, to examine a soundscape composition without detailed context, but for a series of prompts for annotations. These evocations are looped into slides forming a tapestry that tessellates and refracts as the clicking sound of the looping slide carousel, echo the call and response of two voices reading fragments of Gertrude Stein’s Ida, a restless traveller, who also enjoys the privilege of rest.
‘Drift’ will run during the London Gallery Weekend (31 May – 2 June).
Opening hours during the LGW: 31 May and 1 June: 11pm – 6pm, 2 June: noon – 5pm
Links:
https://londongalleryweekend.art/exhibitions/353-drfit/
https://www.galleriesnow.net/artwork/some-boats-wait-forever