"Hello Sadness"

Ola Sikora's first solo exhibition and an intimate presentation of her latest works. The gallery space is transformed into a place where illness is treated as a companion that can help us learn and know something new. The title of the exhibition refers to French poet Paul Éluard's poem "Adieu tristesse/Bonjour tristesse."

The spaces of the medical narrative, and above all the hospital, are the place where our lives begin - at birth, and also end - with death. At both of these moments, we are accompanied by crying. First from the fear of the world, then from its loss. The body thus becomes the primary center of the tensions and excesses of our identity. However, it delineates the fragile boundaries of these experiences. Everything that crosses our skin and gets out violates the order of things, creating something in between: a breach, a white spot, a hole.

The artist - although she herself is well acquainted with the topography of hospitals - notes that it is not necessary to be sick ourselves. For it is enough that our loved ones suffer or we witness someone else's suffering. One's own or someone else's, it doesn't matter. Illness always leaves a mark. Sikora, however, does not create myths about the uniqueness of those afflicted with illness, but tames the fear of it, and teaches self-soothing, stemming from the need to understand one's own condition, thus abolishing the boundary between private and public. As a result, the body can become complete, and the previously detached fragments of the zac

Artists: Ola Sikora

Curator: Aleksandra Pietrzak

Widna Gallery | Cracow PL