ARCHERS. AGNIESZKA KRYST

Archers is a performance inspired by two sculptures located in Bydgoszcz, the city’s modern-day double symbol. One is the classic monument of a female archer by Ferdinand Lepcke, of 1908, standing in front of the Teatr Polski. The other is a sculpture by Marcin Jagodziński-Jagenmeer, standing in front of the Opera Nova, presented to the public in 2013. Posing for both sculptures were models whose identities remain pretty much unknown. It is that complicated relationship between the artist and his muse, the politics of aesthetic canons and the body’s potential for being sculpted that worked as an impulse for the choreographer Agnieszka Kryst to approach movement as an emancipatory tool.

In Archers the final shape of the sculptures is subject to deconstruction, and generating tension in the body becomes a method for creation and demolition of a movement form. Kryst and Sikora lend the Archers their own bodies, faces and voices. They force their way under the surface of a symbol to invest it with agency. Exploring the themes of the female experience in art and the physicality of emotions, they design a dismembered identity, one that is subject to constant transformation and embodied.

ARCHERS. The muse as a catalyst for an artist’s work.

ARCHERS. Immobile sculpted image as an object of contemplation.

ARCHERS. Tension as means of activating the body.

ARCHERS. Tremor of the body as an emancipatory strategy.