3rd Kyoto University-Inamori Foundation Joint Kyoto Prize Symposium [Arts] Zofia Kulik

July 10, 2016
3rd Kyoto University-Inamori Foundation Joint Kyoto Prize Symposium
http://kuip.hq.kyoto-u.ac.jp/
https://ocw.kyoto-u.ac.jp/en/opencourse-en/158

[Arts]
Zofia Kulik
Master of Art
Photographer

Title of Presentation
“Far away from wars. I am deathly afraid”

I would like to present two of my works which are polar opposites in terms of structure.

‘All the Missiles Are One Missile’ (1993). The title is a paraphrase of T.S. Eliot’s words: ‘…all the women are one woman’. This work takes the form of a “photo-carpet”. Viewed from afar, it appears to be a geometric pattern; however, as one draws closer, realistic images can be recognized. All of the images were taken from my archive. Many of them refer to the history of images and how they were used as visual artifices by propagandists in building nations and shaping societies. I once wrote: ‘I am fascinated by closed forms, centricity, symmetry, multiplication, order, figural ornament, imposing upon myself certain already existing patterns of structures’. These principles seem to be far removed from the freedom of creation. ‘I was afraid of myself - that I can feel and visualize subordination so well. I do not show an individual man. By visualizing "subordination," do I appreciate and praise it, or do I mock it and abolish it? Accepting "subordination" as my problem and theme, full of fear and hatred toward the situation in which subordination occurs, I take an artist’s revenge with every weapon (symbolic and formal) that has been used against me’. This raises the question: Is a symbolic weapon the artist’s only tool for influencing reality?

The second work ‘From Siberia to Cyberia’ (1998-2004) has no central point, no borders within composition, and no metaphors. This work could be endlessly continued. The two names in the title refer to: Siberia – a bleak, frozen land, for many generations a place of exile for dissidents, and Cyberia – the name of the first Internet café in London: Cyberia Cafe. In 1998, I had no personal experience of the reality of either Siberia or Cyberia. Over the course of many years, I took photographs of images on television screens. The work is made up of over eighteen thousand images. The idea was ‘…to record the “river” of television images which “drift” in front of the eyes of most inhabitants of the planet (my eyes included). This visual material includes events, people, natural phenomena, wars, and also current affairs - which were recorded with film cameras (and have been from the moment of its invention), and then shown on television’. I was personally distant from those events, and yet, they have helped to create my mind and sensibility, and the work is like a trace of what my eyes have seen.

Both works are like epic maps. They are based on the quantity of images and the relations between them. I play with images. These are photographic images but I do not see myself as a photographer. I would like a theoretician to analyze the differences between my photo-works and photographs made by Ishiuchi Miyako. Our works seem to be in polar opposition but they express, I think and believe, a similar thoughtful perspective on the world.

(A curious discovery: Miyako and I share the same birth year (1947) and, coincidentally, so did our respective mothers (1916).