CT / Magdalena Lazar: Laboratory of Living Sentiments

Magdalena Lazar: Laboratory of Living Sentiments

Do you remember the childhood game? He loves me. He loves me not. He loves me. He loves me not. He loves me. He loves me not. You are thinking of your beloved and carefully remove the petals. Then one day he gives you a rose. It’s beautiful. You wish it would never stop blooming – just like your love. You don’t find it absurd at all, you just like living sentiments. You decide to saturate the flower with 20% glycerine in glucose solution and then you cover the petals with flour to prevent the oxygen from getting in. Two weeks later, you carefully dig out the flower and dust it with a brush.

And that’s it. The rose. Exactly as it was. A flower, one of the main vanitas symbols, transitions to eternity. From now on, the moment can last forever – similarly to the infinity of the fields full of greenhouses where the eternally blooming roses are grown. When we look at these post-natural rose gardens from a bird’s eye view, we can sense that under the glass panels, there are not only the soft and sweet-smelling rosebuds, but also the promise of eternal happiness.

In her exhibition The Laboratory of Living Sentiments, Magdalena Lazar uses formal means typical of advertising and relaxation materials, and through them creates a three-channel video, which is an idyllic-hyperrealistic visualisation of an attempt to eternally keep what seems to be destined to ephemerality. After all, as the artist emphasises, a series of seemingly absurd thoughts is now the currency that changes the world.

Magdalena Lazar (1986) born in Poland. Her artistic practice consists in a deep interest both in human motivations for creating inventions and pushing the world forward and in an incessant sense of ‘future shock’, or too many changes in too short a time. Archaeology of the present failed prognoses and utopian vision, as well as initiatives related to post-growth, are her main area of interest. Magdalena Lazar work in animation, video, photography, installation, and object. She gives a visual form to true stories which appear to be fictions. 

Zofia Małysa

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Magdalena Lazar: Laboratory of Living Sentiments (25. 6.–30. 7. 2019)
Artist: Magdalena Lazar
Curator: Zofia Małysa

Opening: 25. 6. 2019, 19:00