Magda Stawarska-Beavan: Spaces and Moments

25 Sep 2020-15 May 2021

Overview

In her London debut solo show 'Spaces and Moments', Stawarska-Beavan investigates the collective lost memory with video/sound installations and various paper works. Shadows and traces haunting a once-great industrial city are vehicles for Stawarska-Beavan to reconstruct possible present-day perception of what is now gone. Through a process of listening to first-hand accounts of Polish Jewish women’s lives, days spent walking the streets of Lodz in her native Poland and hours of perusing through street plans, maps and architectural drawings in the archive, Magda Stawarska-Beavan has embarked upon a project which allows us to glimpse the traces of lives obliterated, songs unheard, clothes unmade and fabulous buildings replaced by busy parking lots and scruffy children’s parks. What have the natives leave to share about the city, and what can a stranger hear and see more clearly because of unfamiliarity? Her desire to help audience remember what has been lost or forgotten has driven the artist to create the exhibition, quiet in appearance, but daring in concept. This desire is lined with tender affection: the artist painstakingly unfolds the city’s hidden narratives by tracing its history with much care, always with deeply felt connection with the subjects. This sense of connection, of roots, or belonging, is what makes this show feel unambiguously humane.