from the Esther series, 2009, photogram, mixed media

ESTER

The book Ester tells the story of how a Jewish woman named Ester, who became queen in the Persian Empire, saved her people from a pogrom. It is in her memory that the Purim holiday is celebrated.

The circle is a symbol of unity and the absolute, of perfection; time and infinity, timelessness and perpetual repetition of life.

Beata Długosz has prepared a project for the Kolín Synagogue, visually related to her previous works Eos (2007) and Iris (2008). She works with photograms, however photograms in her interpretation transcend the borders of simply placing objects on to photosensitive material, and are instead inventive work with light and a combination of techniques and random processes. In the dark room she, as Jan Bujnowski wrote of her work, continues the age-old battle between light and darkness. The process of the creation of the photograms is similar in style to performance art; the result is a unique and unrepeatable work dependent on space and time for its creation. As well as creative work in the dark room, Beata studies the reactions of individual objects to light, and their gradual transformation.

Her works exhibited in the synagogue, in the women’s gallery (where better to place an echo of the story of Ester), are also based on this principal. Circles from various reacting emulsions that change colour during the course of the exhibition are spread using a thin two metre rod on a thing layer of white fabric. The work will de facto be created only by light conditions at play inside the Synagogue, and additionally each will change differently, based on its interaction with its own space. It can be said that Beata links the retraction of process art to the critical debate about the search for artistic freedom of the 1960s. The process of the origin of the work becomes a work itself. Distinct from minimalism and postminimalism Beata Długosz restores content to her works, content that we become aware of in the unique space of the synagogue.

– Helena Musilová