IN ONE CUT /Natalia Sara Skorupa -By Blood and Scar

Natalia Sara Skorupa
8-21 August 2025 PLENUM Dawna Stocznia Gdańska / Former Gdańsk Shipyard 
Curator Grzegorz Klaman cooperation Piotr T. Mosur

The project spotlights two young artists that stand out for their critical stance towards the realities of cognitive capitalism and their active revisiting of the demand for applied and socially effective art.
The decomposition of avant-garde postulates, their dissipation, calls for an effort to map out the field of art and breathe new life into it. Having developed in response, these attitudes represent a distinct course of action embarked on by the artistic subject between the autonomy of art and art as a tool of
power-knowledge in the area of pervasive consumption. Accepting Bruno Latour’s suggestion that the traditional division between facts and values should be abandoned, thus situated activity /artistic practice/ invariably constitutes a realm of experimentation. It is our belief that apoliticality and
neutrality are nothing but a showy appearance because “politicisation relates to the very fact of inventing this irreducible difference (between facts and values),” it is an appearance because, in fact, art deals with problems seemingly indifferent or neutral, but, in effect, is about the division of roles
between the resources of the political in relation to the field of re-production and appropriation as the essence of cognitive capitalism /Latour/. We never give up striving to renew the relations of the very imperative behind artistic action within ruptured reality towards another reconfiguration. With
a single cut, we lay bare a layer of fermenting compost.

Grzegorz Klaman

 

By Blood and Scar – The main inspiration for the exhibition comes from a dissertation on the Exemplification of Polishness, or the question of national identity in relation to Polish critical art, national and transnational cinema.
My work calls attention to the core of the stereotypes about pathological/marginal patriotic attitudes, while at same time pointing at the possibilities for redefining gestures and symbols rooted in the far-right movement that represents a threat in a world witnessing a heightened
conflict between public opinion fuelled by political gamesmanship and refugees or sexual minorities. Contained in the exhibition are dangers arising from the far right growing in power,  national identity as social consciousness, classification of patriotic attitudes within the
framework of expanded understanding of meanings and symbols, and the legacy of Polish intellectual culture based on the traumas (traumaland) caused by afterimages of communist rule and internal state tensions. The show presents images known from the public space,
portraying violence, monuments and historical monumentalism. It is also an expression of my own distant attitude and the discovery of my and my family’s patriotism. This is a story of the stereotypes about Poles, an exploration of why, and how, we ourselves perpetuate them.
What is Poland like seen through the eyes of a young lesbian who has been raised and has grown up in an era of a turbulent socio-political transformation?