The metaphysical concept of common experience once was considered to constitute the core of human nature. Yet it seems to have disappeared from the agenda of today’s consciousness. Meanwhile the philosophical language that made use of such terms has proved valueless in expressing the contemporary intellectual climate. Postmodernism has made all beliefs in a universal basis for existence, human behavior and needs pass into the history of ideas. In the process, it has sown the seeds of doubt about the cross-cultural or cross-historical foundations of (and within) the individual. So much so that people today find themselves in a sphere of troubling subjectivism – one where the only common and objective experience is the experience of chaos.

Freed from the constraints of metaphysics and theology, individuals face the inevitable necessity of having to “construct some sense”, relying solely on themselves and using a paradigm in which life, death, freedom, responsibility, love or the expression of one’s sexuality are open to unlimited renegotiation. To be sure, this transfer is a remarkable one. Yet it did not flatten the emotional amplitude with which human experience take shape in the contemporary world. On the contrary, it seems to have sharpened and intensified the process.

A sensitive barometer as there is for registering dislocation, art is able to record such societal shifts with precise earthiness. Moreover, in spite of losing its universal prerogatives, art retains its ability to communicate. As a result, even content formulated from extremely individualistic positions gains a dimension that goes beyond subjectiveness. “Extra Strong Super Light”, an international contemporary art exhibition held in the city of Szczecin, Poland, in 2003 offered viewers the opportunity to see the artistic manifestations of this change.

Agnieszka Kalinowska, Just a Little Bit More, installation, rubber bands, 180x700 cm, 2002.

The exhibition grouped 15 artists from Poland, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Ukraine, whose works tackle existential issues in times that are stigmatized by utter ambivalence. It was the fifth in a series of biennale events to take place in the city since 1995 and represented a further step in the exploration of  the Baltic region’s artistic output and the ideas shaping the contemporary context in which it is produced.

“Horizon Line” (1995), which initiated the program, was an attempt – quite common in the 1990s – to overcome the atomization of the region and to find a shared platform that could become a starting point for further investigations. Primarily an optical experience, the “horizon line” also is an expression rich in metaphoric and epistemological connotations. The exhibition settled all its participants within the boundaries of common experiences.

Two years later, a need to transgress this horizon produced a “map” of this newly discovered land via an exhibition called “Baltic Ikonopress – Map” (1997). This subjective, emotionally loaded map – coupled with the rapidly developing contacts among the people that were jointly creating the artistic landscape of the region – led to another exhibition “NEWS” Szczecin – Riga – Visby (1999 – 2000). Presented in the three cities, “NEWS” transformed metaphoric wanderings into real overseas peregrinations. It released artistic objects from their permanent identities, while at the same time locating them within the boundaries of a post-conceptual tradition in which visual characteristics of artistic messages are given a rather low level of importance.

The skeptical moderation of the aesthetic power of art that dominated “NEWS” clearly opposed another dominant trend of the 1990s – art inspired by popular iconography, pop culture and advertising (rather than by sophisticated, meta-artistic studies). An examination of those influences on contemporary art produced in the Baltic region (and beyond) formed the central theme of “Sybaris” (2001), which presented a wide range of productions inspired by today’s consumer culture – from cynical affirmation to criticism and disturbing ambivalence.

Ilya Chichkan & Piotr Wyrzykowski, Atomic Love, video and photo series, each photograph 100x100 cm, 2002.

The impulse to create “Extra Strong Super Light” was the need to move the focus away from the constantly, if chaotically, changing cultural landscape to an “inner landscape”, with all its dynamic relationships and changes. It also represented an attempt to gauge the experiences specific to a part of Europe – the Baltic region – where that change has been most profound. As a result, the exhibition comprised productions that revealed the complexities when individuals are torn from previous a priori modes of existence, as well as pieces which, through their meditative nature, force open the framework of the destructive tendencies of postmodern culture. The title of the exhibition originated from this very bipolarity.

“Extra Strong Super Light” opened with “Atomic Love”,  a work by Ukrainian artist Iliya Chichkan and Piotr Wyrzykowski from Poland. In their joint productions, the artists often create multimedia projects. “Atomic Love” is a film shot at the site of the Chernobyl nuclear plant and accompanied by a series of six carefully composed snapshots. The technological changes and the consequences of the development of modern civilization – the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl led to an unprecedented ecological and human catastrophe – constitute the immediate background of the project. However, its strength lies in the irony (as opposed to  seriousness) in which it addresses its theme.

“Atomic Love” creates a grotesque and futuristic vision of a world where only laughter can alleviate a dangerous, overwhelming situation. In a post-catastrophic landscape, the artists place a pair of lonely lovers at the center of an unsuccessful “human experiment”. Dressed in anti-radiation suits, they wandering about an apocalyptic landscape trying to establish physical contact. A Geiger counter is discretely, but constantly, showing high levels of radiation. Under the veneer of a comic story (the heroes desperately pretend to be making love), lies a bitter diagnosis of a contemporary world where the primacy given to technology has distanced humans both from each other and themselves, and at the expense of the natural world. As a result, technology gains a completely new dimension – the power to remodel the world and human relationships, thus enabling itself to enter the sphere of the most intimate interpersonal contacts. 

Ene-Liis Semper, The Red Line, video, 2002.

Tensions in human relationships play a key role in Agnieszka Kalinowska’s art. The Polish artist’s installation “Just a Little bit More...”  shown at “Extra Strong Super Light” is made of totally “non-sculptural” material, i.e., the little rubber bands used by pharmacists to prepare medicines. Her work is based on the dynamic relationship between two characters – actors in an undefined drama. Kalinowska layers the rubber bands to build up the bodies, imitating the intricate ducts of blood vessels that permeate their muscles. The extreme tension that results from the bodies placed in confrontation produces a power so great that the bodies lose their cohesion and qualities. Destruction is brought to extremes and turns into auto-destruction. It no longer belongs to the realm of rationality.

Kalinowska’s work reveals a depressing condition of human consciousness – the loss of faith in Reason that is accompanied by doubts in the stable order of existence, and particularly of human existence, that results from the conviction that human life has but a chance character and one which can easily be disintegrated. Though unable to identify causality in the relationships between the characters, the viewer does discover a much more important trace which reveals the power mechanisms behind human relations.

Ene-Liis Semper’s performative works are deeply personal. The Estonian, who uses video as her primary medium, appears in nearly all her films. She constructs screenplays condensed in their simplicity and extreme in their expression. The artist places herself in oppressive situations and subjects herself to humiliations. Semper’s films from the mid- and late-1990s stressed sex and aggression. Yet while her latest works possess a more meditative character, they retain Semper’s characteristic precision in communicating messages. The sense of ambivalence Semper creates lies in sophisticated violence, which is less the product of the environment than emanating from the artist herself. Using her body as the target, the artist gives herself the right to feel pain, humiliation and anxiety. The situations she depicts resemble rites of passage that – through a series of extreme experiments persistently conducted – determine the boundaries of individual identity. The artist’s subsequent films reveal a growing isolation and an unwillingness to establish relationships with the environment, thus concentrating ever more on the inner self.

Extra Strong Super Light, works by Monika Wiechowska (photographs) and Lars Nilsson (sculpture), Museum of Contemporary Art, dept. of the National Museum in Szczecin, 2003. Photo: Grzegorz Solecki.

In the film “Red Line”, shown at “Extra Strong Super Light”, the isolated, alienated artist is shown hanging passively upside down, not anchored in the reality and hopelessly balancing on a line. There is a temptation to interpret Semper’s work in the context of shamanistic practices in which intense corporal experiences lead to a state of enlightenment and understanding. However, the artist’s work is devoid of this gnostic and cathartic element. It is too deeply immersed in a contemporariness that makes every truth relative. 

The body as the primary basis of identity was a main artistic theorem in the 1990s canon, to which Egle Rakauskaite’s video installation “In Fat” (presented at “Extra Strong Super Light”) belongs. The body enables the individualization of a specific “ego” by differentiating it from the rest of the matter. But it is also subject to factors limiting one’s individual freedom and mobility.

The Lithuanian artist immerses herself in a vat of cooling fat, which undergoes a gradual stagnancy and thus reveals the body’s ambivalent character. While changing its texture and color, the fat strongly stimulates the viewers’ senses. One cannot help being both fascinated by the extraordinary visual beauty of the process and experiencing feelings of disgust and discomfort. The body which has been petrified in organic matter experiences a symbolic death. Rakauskaite’s work often has been placed in the feminist perspective, but “In Fat” clearly crosses over this boundary. Similarly, its unusual potential is not diminished by the awareness of cultural contextualization of individual human experience, which includes a fundamental and irreversible cognizance of the experience of death.

Hanna Nowicka-Grochal’s artistic practice could be read both via gender issues and psychoanalytical methods. The Polish artist also plays the role of protagonist in visualized situations. She does not, however, remain alone within their boundaries, shifting her effort to depict the basic structures of an individual “ego” in the sphere of the dynamic relationship with a partner. Nowicka-Grochal focuses on recording private, intimate situations intertwined in sexuality and the need to re-integrate with The Other. The archetypal vision works to overcome the polarity of the sexes and creates a network of tensions and associations that is present in the artist’s productions, which correspond with one another. The analysis of the layers of dependence, domination and manipulation – and their ambivalent vectors – that are present in the contact between woman and man is always accompanied by a sense of loneliness that ebbs away only in moments of erotic intimacy. Such relations belong, according to the artist, “rather to the realm of a tantric experience than to the realm of sacrifice and loss.”  Nowicka-Grochal’s photographs function as independent art productions and often are arranged within inflatable rubber objects whose shapes allow them to be identified unambiguously with real life objects and characters. This also is the case in the installation “The Pleasure Out of Reach”, which was presented at “Extra Strong Super Light”, where a row of flesh-colored hammocks separates the audience from a photograph of a silhouette of a male body tightly wrapped in translucent rubber. The work reveals a rudimentary network of interpretational references, including a sense of distance and a desire to transgress that is never to be entirely satisfied, in the multiple layers of emotional and sexual tension that exist between partners.

Egle Rakauskaite, In Fat, video installation, 1998. Photo: Grzegorz Solecki.

The complexity of relationships between woman and man – and the attempts to domesticate, control and release the inherent sexual tension – constitute the basic narrative of the Finnish artist Jari Silomäki’s “Rehearsals for Adulthood”. In compound photographic frescos, Silomäki manages to combine lyric elements with an extraordinary sense of situation comedy. “Rehearsals for Adulthood” analyses emotional and erotic initiations –  the moment when awakening sexuality experiences culture’s tight muzzle.

The almost entirely black and white work is presented as a series of  album-sized photographs that feature a prominently displayed hero, who introduces the audience into the most private spheres of his psyche and imagination in a story of young love’s erotic pursuit that is moving in its authenticity. In almost every frame, the hero looks directly into the camera lens and the cable shutter-release is plainly visible. This unusual narration resembling a diary is meant to mesmerize the viewer. Silomäki plays a sophisticated game with his audience – one based in self-portrait tradition. It is impossible to understand the rules of the game until one has penetrated the artist’s methods of work. All the presented situations and scenes are fictitious, precisely arranged and set. The hero turns out to be an actor, who could be at most interpreted as the author’s alter ego. The formal structure of the work is based on specific relationships – between artist/narrator and  the hero of the cycle, and the hero and the audience. The photographed scenes is juxtaposed with brief comments, lyric observations, sour and bitter confessions that oscillate between the woman he desires, erotic experiences, and aching loneliness, and add to the piece’s documentary character.

While the emotionally and erotically unstable hero from Silomäki’s cycle experiences the innocent infatuation of adolescence, Lars Nillson introduces the viewer into sexual fantasies of a much heavier character. Sex, violence and death in illusory constellations constitute the core of the Swedish artist’s productions. “Game is Over”, displayed at “Extra Strong Super Light”, is the quintessence of a fascinating interrelation between eroticism and violence. Deer-like women and dog-like men, tight costumes covering their bodies – including their faces that do not look entirely human – couple in sadomasochistic positions that give little hint at who is the oppressor and who is the victim. An ambiguous game is played here – one based on domination, manipulation and anxiety mixed with frenetic sexual arousal. The animal sensuality of the characters is highlighted by the versatility of their perfect bodies.

Jari Silomaki, untitled, photograph, 2002.

Nilsson explores topics usually dealt with by the gutter press. Sexuality, normally muzzled by intellect,  is unleashed, becoming an animalistic drive which is sublimated by the artist in a sophisticated, libertine manner. This division of body and spirit based on a dualistic understanding of nature and culture, so much evident in the West has deeply influenced the belief that animalistic impulses greatly affect human behavior. In the 20^th century, psychoanalytical techniques revealed the mechanisms of the subconscious and the role of instincts. The animal nature, while subject to biological determinism, has become a mirror, albeit a distorted one, that reflects all emancipative efforts. The fascination with the animal world often seen in artistic projects usually is connected with some attempts of facing the issues of  identity and of redefining the relationships between a man and his animal nature.

Monika Wiechowska’s “Animals” may not be representative in this Polish artist’s entire oeuvre, but it is certainly one of the main themes of her artistic practice. Wiechowska often refers to old masters’ iconography in her still-lifes, self-portraits, and in her photographic frames, carefully selecting elements of reality. Her formal perfection “freezes” the photographed motifs, petrifying them in their most perfect form. In a similar manner, the artist photographs animals, endowing them with ominous and disquieting qualities. However, her way of lining up objects in a frame distorts reality so much that only after quite a while does the viewer notice that the animals are actually dead and that their widely open eyes express nothing. The artist photographs animals during routine hunts organized by hunting associations. Wiechowska questions the culture that places animals at the bottom of the hierarchical structure of beings objecting to the legitimized violence used against them.

Bodily connections that link the human and animal worlds are the starting point for the Latvian artist Solveiga Vasiljeva’s work. The installation “Tongue Sensitivity”, consisting of a series of photographs and a video, was created using state-of-the-art medical diagnostic methods. Medicine and related branches of science penetrate the most inaccessible parts of a human body, revealing its internal pictures which normally shunned because of the instinctive anxiety they inspire. Yet the interest in the internal topography of the body as well as locating it in the domain of art instead of the frames of science is one of the most important inspirations in contemporary art.

Jaan Toomik, Father & Son, video, 1998.

Vasiljeva is far from introducing dissected parts of a body into the gallery space. Instead, she creates an over-aesthetic image of a hidden reality. The surreal images of layers of human and animal organs obtained by means of computer-generated x-ray techniques unexpectedly reveal some similarity not only one to the other, but also to the vegetable kingdom. They drift towards the mythical concept of a holistic nature of the world, a spiritual vision that animates archetypal structures of the human psyche and locates them in the sphere of a holistically understood reality.

 Jaan Toomik’s meditative performance art can hardly be unambiguously categorized. One of the Estonian artist’s work’s (presented at “Extra Strong Super Light”), the video-installation “Father and Son”, sparks off an almost cathartic reaction in the viewer. The figure of a naked man making circles on a frozen lake with white ice stretching as far as the horizon is one of the most energetic image loops of the 1990s. Toomik’s film functions like a conveyer belt, which in a split of a second makes the viewer realize the value of individual freedom. This concise and formally clear picture locates the subject in a reality of a higher sphere and enables the viewer establish contact with the innermost layers of the self.

That said, “Father and Son” offers neither naive escapism, nor it does absolutize the experience of nature. On the contrary, it is the embodiment of a defined cultural heritage and of being involved in a very specific social and existential situation. However, the stability of nature that counterpoints the changeability of socio-political constellations does provide a wider background that connotes and supports the reintegration of a human identity. Toomik’s film is also a very private and poetic record of the relationship between father and son – the soundtrack contains a Gregorian choral sung by the artist’s young son – which additionally is completed by references to autobiographical threads (the recurring motif of an early loss of a father). The impact of “Father and Son” lies both in its ability to penetrate cultural taboos and in the work’s potential to get through to the center of spirituality.

Maix Mayer, Oberflache 1, video, 2001.

The work of Polish artist Danuta Dąbrowska –Wojciechowska reveal a similar way of understanding the genius loci of experienced places. The impulses coming from nature in particular are to be reckoned with. Wojciechowska’s contemplative light-and-sound installations, released from the constraints of plot, stimulate the audience to establish a new and refreshed relationship with the visual environment. Wojciechowska usually focuses on “splinters of reality”: muddy pathways, pieces of cobble stones, the porous texture of a flaking wall – all details from backgrounds selected by the sharp-eyed artist. Distinct in composition and with narration reduced to but a quiet whisper flowing down as little torrents of rain – as well as using a wide range of color nuances – allow the artist to turn the gigantic suitcase presented at “Extra Strong Super Light” into an extraordinary artistic-cum-therapeutic object. At the same, time the suitcase becomes a reservoir of memory that stores images shot through with both the psychical energy and the sensitivity of the artist.

German artist Maix Mayer’s minimalist conceptual video-installation arranged around the film “Oberfläche 1” introduced an element of subversion into “Extra Strong Super Light” and thus turned the exhibition’s dominant perspective upside down. Mayer trains his interest in architecture, cinematography and the history of ideas on the issues of perception and observation. Not only does he often veer from more traditional focal points in his work, but he also often suggests a change of direction, clearly questioning the classical, anthropocentric relationship between the subject and the object of an observation.

In “Oberfläche 1” the lens of a camera dehumanizes itself while getting bogged down in the guts of architecture. The latter’s geometric structure builds in its rationalism a perfect compositional framework for the performance. A man observed from this perspective, moving along in changing and chaotic trajectories, introduces an element of dynamism. Mayer presents alternative modes in which the reality can function. He also reveals the arbitrariness of cognition, which accepts only what is “reported” to the cognitive subject. 

Monika Nystrom, example 003, light installation, 2003. Photo: Grzegorz Solecki.

Swedish artist Monika Nyström’s light installations have a similar, analytically structural, character. Here, the process of getting rid of an unnecessary anecdote is brought to its extremes. However, formal reductionism does not mean that the message is depersonalized. On the contrary, Nyström’s works are based on personal experiences about the physical relationships the body establishes with the environment that surrounds it. By presenting her work in an atmosphere of complete darkness, Nyström succeeds in totally disturbing the viewer’s sense of orientation, creating sensations in which time appears to freeze and space seems to dematerialize. Using ultraviolet light, complex and fluorescent structures emerge from the darkness. Their conciseness and the geometrical perfection of their shapes suggest references to the tradition of post-minimalism. However, Nyström’s work triggers emotions far from those typical for the dry precision of minimalist art. The light structures created by the artist evoke visions of crystalline microstructures otherwise inaccessible to the human eye and the breathtaking images of the interstellar space. This is how Nyström’s art visualizes one of the deepest human longings – specifically, the desire to have the observed image, irrespective of its size, fit in with a common, homogeneous matrix.

Gun Holmström’s artistic practice is a polar opposite. The Finnish artist has combined art education with sociology studies, which have determined the specificity of the scope of her interests and methods. The film “Cosmos”, presented at “Extra Strong Super Light”, resembles a documentary in which the artist records the story of a patient (in reality, her childhood friend), suffering from schizophrenia. The man, nicknamed Cosmos, presents his vision of the spiritual structure of the universe. While getting to the end of his story, “Cosmos” utters words which paradoxically could comment Nyström’s light structures:

“People like to think that the atom is very small, the sun is very big,
that the stars are far away and that the universe is vast. But in fact
the little doesn't exist without the large, and the large doesn't exist
without the little, everything is connected. I don't really know if
there is any difference between what's large and little.
That's one of my conclusions. Maybe there are no proportions at all.”

It seems that we are making a large circle in which the analytical powers of the intellect come to the same conclusions as a mind stigmatized with a mental illness. 

Gun Holmstrom, Cosmos, video, 2001.

Because Holmström has refrained from commenting on Cosmos’s narration and owing to the restrained character of his recounting, the film manages to escape the pitfalls of naive banality. Its strength lies in a bloodless dethronement of Reason as the dominant tool of cognition. Rationality as a superstition is the starting point for a qualitatively different existential situation. 

Art often reaches this level of energetic tension, which lets it express fundamental dilemmas of its time. “Extra Strong Super Light” was a subjective constellation of productions which impart a similar potential.

Translated from Polish into English by Marek Stelmaszczyk.

Proof read by Rick Butler.

Text originally published in Extra Strong Super Light – 5th Baltic Contemporary Art Biennial in Szczecin, Szczecin, 2003, ed. by Magdalena Lewoc, published by the National Museum in Szczecin.

Magdalena Lewoc. Chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, dept of the  National Museum in Szczecin. Curator of the Extra strong Super Light exhibition.