KUBA DORABIALSKI
’CRYING’
CURATED BY DANIEL MUDIE CUNNINGHAM
17 AUGUST – 22 SEPTEMBER, 2023
OPENING NIGHT: 17 AUGUST
Kuba Dorabialski, Crying with all the other cry babies, 2023, Pigment print on cotton rag, 50cm x 50cm. Image courtesy of the artist.
ID: The artwork from the left shows a clearing of pine trees across the bottom third of the photograph. Only debris and the flat round stumps of the evenly chopped trees remain. The perspective is at eye-level, and a smooth, narrow dirt road curves through the clearing from near the bottom right edge of the photograph towards the left edge at the top of the bottom third. The clearing along the front edge of the photograph slopes gently downwards away from the road, while the clearing on the other side of the road slopes gently upwards towards the right. In the top two thirds of the image, behind the road and clearings, are dense rows of soft grey pine trees, standing vertically and sloping down in height from left to right. The narrow spaces between them appear black, and a light grey clear sky is visible above. A small cluster of darker grey pine trees, with their tips cut off by the top edge of the photograph, stand at the edges of both clearings on either side of the road—in the bottom left and top right. This location is a radiata pine plantation in Sunny Corner State Forest, Wiradjuri Country.
ARTIST STATEMENT
What does it mean to be homesick on colonised land? Crying is an exhibition of photographs, sculpture, and video that explores themes of unabashed emotion, romantic love, geographic and cultural displacement, and starlings, an invasive bird species introduced into Australia in the 19th century.
Taking the structure of a fictional documentary, the work tells the story of a Polish migrant living on Wiradjuri country and the bittersweet process of her assimilation into a landscape that teems with so many of the markers of European imperialism.
Kuba Dorabialski, Crying, 2023. Installation view. Photography by Jessica Maurer.
ID: A wide shot of two grey gallery walls, connected to form an L-shape. On the left wall, there are four framed black and white photographs displayed in a straight horizontal line. On the wall to the right, there are five framed black and white photographs displayed in a straight horizontal line. All of the photographs depict landscapes of the pine plantations in the Central West of New South Wales, on Wiradjuri Country. The photographs are presented in pale, raw oak frames. Cascading from the bottom edge of each frame are small, roughly poured drips in bronze.
AUDIO DESCRIPTION
Audio descriptions for the blind and low-vision community have been developed for Crying, in collaboration with Sarah Empey and Sarah Barron. These can be accessed via QR codes located within the gallery space, Verge Gallery encourages patrons to bring their own headphones for this.
Kuba Dorabialski, Crying, 2023. Installation view. Photography by Jessica Maurer.
ID: A wide shot of a gallery wall; three quarters of the wall is painted grey, with the bottom quarter painted white. On the wall is a framed black and white photograph of a camp fire in the middle of a small clearing. The frame is made of pale raw oak. Cascading from the bottom edge of the frame are roughly poured drips of bronze. To the right of the wall, a large free-standing wall is visible. On the screen is a black and white image of a woman in a jumper looking upwards and outwards.
CURATORIAL ESSAY
Emotional intensities are literally distilled in the bottle. Drink to forget, drink to remember. The management of memory is bonded by alcohol and its consumption. Fevered states of happiness inevitably find solace as waves of grief and nostalgia elsewhere, find expression through booze.
A homesick Polish woman retreats to a pine forest in regional New South Wales to drink her sadness away. A foreigner inhabiting stolen land, she is drinking again to lose a dream that used to be. To describe this plight is to invoke torch song melodramatics that extract romance from misery, pathos from times past. Upon entering a clearing in the bushland where the trees have been cut down, she witnesses a murmuration of starlings. Their beautiful flock formation is like a black cloud shapeshifting across the sky. Remote and alone, her newfound isolation in the wake of a failed marriage is amplified by the bird ballet. Moved to tears, she surrenders to the reality of this foreign place as her abode: “I am at the same time invader, and I am at home”.
Kuba Dorabialski, Crying, 2023. Installation view. Photography by Jessica Maurer.
ID: A wide shot of the gallery space; a white wall lined with nine stools is positioned towards the left, a free-standing wall is positioned towards the back-right and in the middle of the space sits a long white bench. On the wall is a still from a video work. In this still, we see a car driving along a countryside road. The road is positioned in the middle of two plains. The camera is positioned at the end of the road so that the car seems to be driving towards the viewer.
Kuba Dorabialski’s Crying is a ficto-documentary meditation on homesickness experienced on colonised land. A complex and melancholy proposition, Crying speaks to home as a vestige of memory lost to social and cultural displacement, human migration patterns poetically distilled in bird colonies. There is a rich tradition of contemporary artists (think Agnes Denes) who have considered migrating birds as a metaphor for human diaspora and colonisation. Starlings, for instance, are a ‘global’ bird species introduced to many parts of the world, including Australia in the mid-1880s. Some descriptions online refer to starlings as ‘introduced’; others term them ‘invasive’. So-called Australia has used similar words to either white-wash or truth-tell its own history of colonisation.
Kuba Dorabialski, Crying, 2023. Installation view. Photography by Jessica Maurer.
ID: A mid shot of a grey wall. On this wall are four framed black and white photographs displayed in a straight horizontal line. All of the photographs depict landscapes of the pine plantations in the Central West of New South Wales, on Wiradjuri Country. The photographs are presented in pale, raw oak frames. Cascading from the bottom edge of each frame are small, roughly poured drips in bronze.
Crying loosely resembles fragments of Dorabialski’s own family migration narrative, but unfolds like a hypnotic waking dream, building to a slow and rejuvenating release of tears. The Australian landscape is aestheticised though a cinematic visual language that paints it as simultaneously foreign and familiar – a cradle for homesickness whichever way you look at it. The nostalgia generated by homesickness autocorrects memories of the past as inherently idealistic and trauma free. The problem with nostalgia is that it wallows in yesterday only to confirm the values of a rose-tinted past. A kind of mnemonic propaganda of selfhood standing still. Where we scratch away in the dirt to unearth an idea of home that was never there from the start.
Daniel Mudie Cunningham
