Sława Harasymowicz: The Spring to Come

About

The Spring To Come unravels the story of a semi-hypothetical figure, an aspiring poet and his attempts to deal with the reality of war through imagination and language. Using a range of media and translation tools to interpret and respond to private and public archival materials and The Poetry Library collection, the artist creates a site-specific installation that interrogates the tensions between images and words.

The exhibition references SS Cap Arcona, a German ocean liner used as the set for Nazi propaganda film Titanic and later as a prison ship, when it was sunk by the allies killing 5,000 concentration camp prisoners, including the artist’s great-uncle.

Begun at Centrala in Birmingham in winter 2015 and further developed through a live performance at the Freud Museum and an exhibition at narrative projects, London, in the summer of 2016, this exhibition concludes a year-long project invoking memory and challenging historical amnesia.

Dr Joanne Morra (Reader in Art History and Theory at Central Saint Martins, co-founder of The Journal of Visual Culture) says of The Spring to Come:
"It is excellent. It is quiet and pensive and poetic, while also being powerful and dramatic. Complex show."

Curated by Dominik Czechowski 
The project is accompanied by a publication designed by the artist containing archival material and newly commissioned writing. Please ask at the Library front desk. 
In partnership with Centrala, Birmingham and narrative projects, London

About the Artist:

Sława Harasymowicz is a visual artist and a PhD candidate at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. She frequently harnesses archive, as a starting point for enquiry, a strategy and a cognitive tool to pose questions around the validity of recollection, the ambiguity of reconstruction, political representation and autobiography. Her work in progress includes a project in collaboration with BWA Gallery in Tarnów, Poland (2017), supported by the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. Recent exhibitions include Layered Narratives: Collage/Photomontage/Print, l’etrangere, London  (2016), Radio On, narrative projects, London, supported by the Arts Council England; H.N.5 515, Centrala, Birmingham (2015), Ersatz, Ethnographic Museum, Kraków (2014), and Wolf Man, Freud Museum, London (2012), following the publication of a graphic novel Wolf Man (Self Made Hero, 2012). Her publishing collaborations have included Penguin Books, The Guardian, Le Gun and Modern Poetry in Translation. Harasymowicz is a recipient of a number of awards including V&A Illustration Awards and the Arts Foundation Fellowship. Her work is held in the V&A Permanent Prints and Drawings Collection, National Museum in Poznań, and other collections internationally.