Things are what we want to see in them. Or otherwise: we see them the way we want  to hear them told to us. The spinning of stories about things (but also people, plants,  insects, bacteria, and others) begins with naming them. Sometimes, then, a single word  equals a thousand images (even though it is usually said to be the opposite). The status  of things is encoded in language, often determining their place in a hierarchy, assigning  them to the category of trophies, or of remains and waste. A stick, dust or a bush belong  to the latter category. 

In the art of Zuzanna Stempska, sticks are material, but also totem, relic, transmitter,  even letter - depending on our ever-changing needs. The less we see (or: the weaker the  evidence), the greater the need to create a story. The poor object is what we see, and  something entirely different. In a museum frame it becomes an allegory, an anecdote,  a strange tool. It is what we want it to become. 

The museum is a ventriloquist’s apparatus: we speak through things.  The place of poor objects in the history of art is well established. According to the  neo-avant-garde strategy of “displacement”, what belonged to the site migrated to the  non-site so that a transformation could occur - alchemical in its nature. The site is anachronistic, it has porous surfaces, caves inward, undergoes processes of  decay, dries out and flakes, it is disproportionate, unstable, has no angles, is dark, un dergoes erosion, its boundaries cannot be drawn, it “consists” of verbs, its temperature  and humidity fluctuate depending on the time of day and year, it accumulates, it tends  toward entropy. 

The non-site is stable, clean, proportionate, bright, its substance is homogeneous, it has  a smooth surface, it “consists” of nouns, it has angles, its boundaries can be drawn, its  temperature and humidity remain constant, it tends toward hierarchy. In the repertoire of visual arts, we use tactics that seem to have their origin in religion  (they are based on belief). These are: exaltation and elevation. This happens through  old, proven tools: frame, background, pedestal, sometimes mirror. Zuzanna Stempska  reaches for the classical museum apparatus - filtering objects from the aesthetic order of  art and those belonging to the functional regime of everyday life - testing its alchemical  power. At the same time, things become this and that, they are set in motion (of meanings, use and status). 

A stick (unlike a branch) is dead. Sticks do not grow on trees. They do not grow at all.  One finds them on the ground, near the ground, in the ground. What separates the site  from the non-site is therefore death. 

In classical criticism of the 19th-century institutional model, the frame and the pedestal  were props from the forensic repertoire. That which was part of life processes (ritual or  community) ended up on the autopsy table, subject to the judgment of expert eyes and  at the mercy of criticism and interpretation. Yet there is nothing more sublime than the  transfiguration of waste, of inanimate (lifeless) matter. A stick in a sterile, gallery setting is  a synecdoche, evoking the “real”, bare world beyond the display case: forest, shrubs by  the highway, but also stories that cannot be written down, written with a stick on water. 

- Sebastian Cichocki, 2025