Aleksandra Waliszewska

It's enough of a recommendation that my friend Katarzyna Szenajch (a visual artist herself) likes Waliszewska: "I seriously like her, cause she's authentically bonkers. I am hugely impressed by her bonkerness. Look at her last.fm: there's Lil Wayne! Or her pet society gallery WTF? Besides, she added me on last.fm, that's nice :) Oh, yeah, and her paintings are good, hehe"

Aleksandra Waliszewska started with beautiful big-scale oil old masters-like painitings. Authentically beautiful. She would receive praise and scholarships, have books published, and all that. But she suddenly changed her style completely. In a really interesting interview for Wysokie Obcasy, she says her old paintings became tiring. That she would labour at them, but have no pleasure from it: "The last one took me six months. And I decided it was mediocre". Now she paints one or two small format gouaches every day, and most depict little girls. Little girls among monsters; ambiguous, disturbing, uncomfortable situations. And she says it gives her real pleasure: "Before, I had a task-oriented approach to work. Now I want to do what gives me pleasure. And it so happens that I find painting little girls in oppressive situations pleasurable."

She insists her work is in no way autobiographic - rather, it's a return to what she used to paint when she was 4 or 5: "I would paint a big head with various animals coming out of it. Or elephants with dead cats. Then at 7 I started drawing naked women running away from Martians, who try to catch them on lassos. Or naked running families." Provocatively, she says it's her boyfriend who often comes up with the titles: Paedophile's Death, Handball with Fritzl, Guardian. "Guardian shows a sleeping girl and a goat. You can't tell if he's protecting her, or lurking. I don't really know myself what it's about - it's a mystery to me too". The most important thing is the composition, not the story - that's secondary. And Waliszewska doesn't feel any discomfort: "I prefer to treat [my paintings] as grotesque".

This one reminds me of The Tiger's Bride, a short story by Angela Carter

It's really interesting to speculate on the victim/perpetrator status in her paintings, the ambiguity of the roles of little girls and beasts. It's not a simple case of "the drawing is empowering when the girl wins". Most of the time, it's completely unclear what the outcome is, and as Waliszewska says herself, she is not interested in it. She likes drawing naked girls surrounded by monsters - it really takes guts to admit it, and say it out loud. It's still such a touchy issue, deriving pleasure from not-beauty, not-serenity, in whatever form. Gore, sex and violence are already controversial, but with the added references to paedophilia Waliszewska is really walking on shaky ground, tackling such issues as the age limits of sexuality, the role of bodily exposure, idols, fetishes, and all this is a context of gender - her protagonists are always female. I, too, admire her bonkerness, as well as courage.

All quotes translated by me from the Wysokie Obcasy interview by Paulina Reiter.
All photos from Aleksandra Waliszewska's Flickr photostream.


Waliszewska has a Facebook, blog, Flickr, and an exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw (until May 23rd). This Saturday, there is a closing party with live music and stuff. (and if you go, Centre for Contemporary Art (CSW) has a really cool Roni Horn exhibit, too)

frl.zucker

I discovered Maren, or frl.zucker, when I was looking for a banner for this blog. Freshly inspired by a friend, who in a moment of crisis told me to do as Kathleen Hannah does, I looked for something that embodies the fierce spirit of the riot grrl brand of militant, but positive feminism. I wanted something that would also motivate the shit out of me. And I found frl.zucker's drawings! I can't remember what phrase I googled, and I don't want to guess, but I can assure you it was somewhere between embarrassing and awesome. frl.zucker is totally not afraid to be embarrassing though. Her blog is very personal, it sometimes reads like a story. And though she never spells it out, you get a feeling she, too, is looking for motivation and inspiration, trying to overcome something that's preventing her from feeling 100% every day. I can really relate to that, and probably so can very many girls and women. It's nice to find inspiration to act in one another. Maren told me that the banner illustration is of her and her best friend Hannah reassuring her she could do anything, which is really sweet, and also really important. If you have a best friend, it's definitely a thing you should tell her once in a while.

Apart from sharing her story and A LOT of awesome, awesome links + posting nice photos, frl.zucker uses a lot of text in her drawings. That's what interested me in her work a lot - exploring the intersections of images and words. It's a really common medium, if you think about it (comic strips, graphic novels, graffiti, prints, even traditional illustration to an extent, and most of graphic design), but one that I feel is left out from a lot of investigation. We think of type as a separate art form, and images as works on its own, or as ones as additions to others, but rarely as a whole. But as Maren put it, it 'lets [one] think about stuff in a more complex way', and it's impossible to choose which one describes the other - they are both equally important, integral elements of a whole.

frl.zucker recently contributed to a scrapbook released as part of Kate Nash's new album, and also designed some tour t-shirts for her. She also made a fabulous press kit for a band called Desperate Teenage Girls, whom I know nothing more about, as they apparently "refuse to put anything about themselves online..."

Maren kindly answered some questions just for Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, and in an awesome handwriting way. My questions are sometimes a bit vague, but it's a really interesting contribution - thank you!

If you wanted to ask frl.zucker anything else, she has a question form thingy of her own, and often replies to questions on her blog. She also has a Flickr, Etsy, and last.fm. And as I hope you can tell from this post, she's pretty awesome.

Women, Fire and Dangerous Things in Exklusiv #88 (05.2010)

The wonderful woman Karolina Sulej, music and fashion journalist, scholar, dj, co-organiser of such awesome events as Photomonth Krakow, contributor to Wysokie Obcasy, music editor and vice-editor of Exklusiv Magazine, is inspired by Women, Fire and Dangerous Things in her May music editorial. I could not be more honoured!

"Your Kid Sister


I recently found some tapes from my childhood years. Apart from 2Unlimited and Guns'n'Roses, there were tapes with my own songs. I was ashamed to find out I have over 5 hours of my lyrical and vocal performances of dubious quality on tape.


Karolina Sulej - vice-editor, music editor
illustration: Magdalena Łapińska

The American documentary Girls Rock is a story about how important it is for girls to "sing to the tape recorder". That is, about how they shouldn't be afraid to express their feelings and be who they are. Specifically, about a summer camp. A rock camp. Young girls, from the age of five or six to teenagers, learn to play, compose, write lyrics, form bands, and at the end, give a concert together. The camp is visited by female rock stars. When Beth Ditto came over, even the tiniest babies pogoed to Standing in the Way of Control. Rock and roll is supposed to work as a way of releasing anger, fear and frustration, as well as of learning to communicate with others, making friends with those similar to you. The girls who came to the camp include: a daughter of drug addicts, sent from one orphanage to another, a chubby Asian girl bullied at school for being a "freak", a girl with ADHD, another with anxiety neurosis. The campsite, in the middle of a forest, was a meeting ground for young girls of all races and classes - a real ersatz America. They say they're afraid of school. That nobody likes them. That they're fat. That they're ugly. That they don't fit in. That they can't believe they can succeed in anything. The teachers want to explain to them that MTV and a few popular girls at school can't dictate their self-worth. And music, again, becomes a mainspring of evolution - in this case a small one, restricted to a few people, but big enough to heal some traumatic experiences of growing up. The little Palace, who at first couldn't cope with other girls, bit, hit, and argued about everything, is smiling widely at the closing concert, fondly looking at her equally little guitarist and singing lyrics she wrote herself: "San Francisco can be so boring, I don't want to go on this trip with mum, because she only thinks of herself, I'm gonna watch this city burn, burn, burn". She drops the piece of paper with song lyrics. We get a close-up: "I wanna be a SOUPer star". I'd like to be a star like that too.

Or one like Your Kid Sister, or Maia Vidal. The frisky Spaniard pulled a right stunt at old hardcore punks. She recorded the hit Poison in a version which easily floors the old hands. Time out, boys. From Maia's MySpace: "The character that was created is a (duh) younger sister who, having found your Rancid records, dragged them into her room and learned to sing along. As you can tell, she never understood that Punk was a movement, a state of mind, or that she was doing it all wrong". You can listen to her "singing along" record on the internet, and also see the video to Poison - a little masterpiece comparable to Bat For Lashes' What's a Girl to Do. Unfortunately, from my childhood adventure with the tape recorder and playing "the keys" I'm only left with the ability to play Kumbaya my lord, Kumbaya and singing Whitney Houston songs correctly on karaoke. And of course, because I couldn't become a musician, I became a music journalist. A female music journalist, actually. Oops.

I recently found an interesting zine online. It's called "Veto" and is about the situation of women in the media. "In 2007 the Fawcett Society collated data from nine leading daily British newspapers: they document two female to seventeen male editors, one female to seventeen male deputy editors and one female to seventeen male comment and review editors. The International Federation of Journalists notes that in 2001 in Canada and North America only 28% of all newspaper journalists and 37% of television journalists were female. The Canadian Newspaper Association records that in 2002 women represented only 8% of all editors-in-chief and publishers for nationally recognised broadsheets." That's a part of the opening manifesto. Are female journalists really still at a risk of bumping their heads against the glass ceiling? I don't think so - the glass ceilings are breaking one after another, even if we get our pretty faces scarred in the process. And for those who wish us hell, we can only sing: Some people are poison, Under my skin like opium, And I'll stare in their eye to annoy them, Yeah they're poison.

I found out about Your Kid Sister and the "Veto" zine from Women, Fire and Dangerous Things - www.womenfiredangerousthings.blogspot.com - a blog ran by female journalist Marta Owczarek. We're publishing her interview with the Spanish band Tu Madre next month."



Nothing makes me happier than to think that this blog actually inspired someone and spread the word about women and their various activities. The blog gets a mention, but the editorial really is about Your Kid Sister and "Veto", and I'm infinitely glad I could support both like this. Maïa Vidal is really French-American and not Spanish, and the blog address is www.womenfiredangerousthings.blogspot.com, but those are minor details that I hope don't spoil the sheer pleasure of seeing this editorial in print for anyone. They certainly don't spoil it for me, I'm giddy like a five year old on stage, Girls Rock-like. Thank you so much, Karolina!