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East of the Sun and West of the Moon

LAURA MAKABRESKU
East of the Sun and West of the Moon

Opening with hot wine: 22.02.2o12 | 20:00
Exhibition – open until 07.04.2013, 24 h
Koletek 12, Krakow

Text about the exhibition:
When I was little, my grandmother used to tell me stories about the Wolski Forest, especially about a place that people call Maidenly Rocks. I remember her telling me, repeatedly, not to go there alone. It is a place, she would warn, where night falls faster, and where all things dark and evil wake up from their dream.

One day, grandmother told me about two little girls who had gone off in the direction of the rocks. They were never found. The story says that the girls happened upon the remains of wild animals in the forest, and that they slipped into the animals’ pelts as if they were dresses, and forever became part of that which is hidden. People see them sometimes, apparently, especially after dusk. Grandmother says that now they are quiet and gentle, just like the deer—although I’ve heard their cry, that plaintive keen, and followed it. At the end there was darkness. I gazed into it, and it gazed into me.

Laura Makabresku (b. 1987 in Brzesko)
Her photographs are imbued with the eldritch atmosphere of fairy tales, in which the ordinary steps into the forest and encounters the uncanny. Balanced on a knife’s edge between tenderness and pain, Makabresku’s scenes, like an Angela Carter fable, are replete with visual metaphors in which death and decomposition overlap and intertwine with an ambiguously virginal eroticism. Elsewhere, talismans abound; waifs—pubescent, though occasionally tinged with decrepitude—reanimate the corpses of animals; and every idyll holds its breath, waiting to be shattered, though counting on kindness.

Makabresku was featured within the ShowOFF section at Krakow Photomonth Festival 2012. Her work has been published widely, in magazines such as Magpie, Atomica, Carne, and Impracabeza. She cooperates with the F.A.I.T. Foundation and Gallery. She lives and works in Krakow.

OFFence gallery
The OFFence outdoor gallery is a collaboration between Angel Wawel, the property developer which is building an apartment complex at Koletek 12, and the Foundation for Visual Arts, organiser of the yearly Krakow Photomonth Festival.

The gallery is dedicated to showcasing the work of emerging young artists connected with Krakow. First exhibition: East of the Sun and West of the Moon by Laura Makabresku, which will be on display through March 2013.

Curator: Magdalena Kownacka
Organiser: Foundation for Visual Arts
Patron: Angel Wawel