Maryna Sakowska / POV: Envy’s here to give congratulations

“…it is so good with you Heinz, that one would like to die!” is a quote from Elfriede Jelinek’s novella ‘Women as Lovers’, which can generally be read as an anti-romantic disillusionment about relationships and marriage in the peaceful Austria of the 1970s. For two heroines, being married to the right man is just an empty construction for climbing the social ladder and the only way to achieve some status and material security in life. Although they themselves name their partnership cohabitations as love, the relationship is not a dream romantic flare-up or a cohabitation full of respect, but a lifelong subscription to a bartering business in which they pay with housework, their own autonomy and, of course, their bodies. Their unconscious manipulative behavior, the result of the oppression of patriarchal society, their resignation from their own emotions, and their desperate desire for understanding, are concentrated here in a single sentence, evoking film subtitles on Maryna Sakowska’s triptych. Two impressively generous faces from Japanese anime greet the viewer’s gaze in the gallery, and their beaming heart-shaped manga looks contrast with the resigned depression and German-sounding name in the subtitles.

Although it might seem that the heroines and heroes of the cult feminist social critique of the 1970s and Japanese comic book characters will have little in common, Maryna Sakowska combines in her painting objects the two cultural circles into a personal, urgent statement in which she copes with the strong division of gender roles in her own family and in Polish society. She explores the superficiality with which Asian pop culture appropriates Western romantic tales of princesses and princes, while she also realizes with dismay how fairy tales about idealized knights and weak girls have determined us since childhood. The repeated motifs of the empty knight armour in her paintings are not only a reference to the imaginary hero of The Nonexistent Knight by Italo Calvino, but are above all a critique of patriarchal feudalism, rooted in us as a proto-system, which is opposed by the array of elf like styled swords, rising to fight from ironing boards of women enslaved by the unpaid domestic chores.

An intuitively rational mixture of theoretical references is connected not only by criticism of the patriarchy, but also by the visually ubiquitous collection of (wilted) rose prints. The varied rose flower decors once support the image of the good wife, in another case they evoke an updated merch by Guns N’ Roses band, but above all they add a bottom layer to Maryna Sakowska’s paintings, which is variably visible and which stretches beneath the diverse motifs like an embarrassingly romantic yet touchingly sincere desire for a big, free love. In case of the painting on a tiny floral dress, reminiscent of an apron from ‘Good girl gone bad’  costume, Maryna refers to the stylization of hentai porn, as she again refers to western society’s doubtful reflection in the mirror of Japanese exaggerated aesthetic, while showing the dark side of the romantic relationship at the same time. Another pornographic reference is hidden in the title of the exhibition itself – POV is an acronym for ‘point of view’, a currently trending meme on TikTok social media platform, but it is also a category of porn videos, in which the viewer is drawn as much as possible into the plot by the camera action.

Maryna Sakowska’s exhibition is a romantic ballad about love, about the pointlessness of the idea of a perfect lifelong relationship and, above all, a sad and very slow ballad about trying to break out of the patriarchy. By the several literature links, music associations and references to the Japanese manga subculture, Maryna creates space for projection of the viewer’s personal love stories as well as for the melancholy of social disillusionment. It exposes us to the perversity with which we commodify love, as well as to the sarcastic smile with which we decorate by padlocks the worn threads of a rigid society, wrapping our freedom and the entire installation. She subconsciously uses emo-romantic aesthetic that influenced her in her teen age and, by ironizing pathetic symbols of love, she also examines her own demands and visions of life … and love.

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Maryna Sakowska`s residency stay is supported by Visegrad fund.