In abandoned houses one can often meet Lilith - a site specific installation by Anka Leśniak

Piotr Piluk, 2011-08-26

Between 1st and 8th of July 2011, the 11th Artists’ Meetings (Polish: XI Spotkania Artystyczne) took place in Pszczyna (Poland). The main idea of the event was to create works of art in urban space and interact with the landscape of the town. An interesting site-specific installation was made by Anka Leśniak on the facade of an abandoned building at Warowna Street, in which the artist used graphic visuals of the Yiddish language.

The installation belongs to a series of works which the artist has created on the facades of abandoned houses in various places. "Sur-realization" in this case is correctly associated with surrealism that is the creation of metaphorical and surprising reality - "surreality" layered above the real world. An abandoned house becomes, in this case, the carrier of two superimposed kinds of meanings. The first kind of meaning is the one generated by the building itself: its own history, the context of the district, the city environment in which it is located. The second is contained in the work of art realized on the facade of the house. Anka Leśniak’s work can be compared to the work of an archeologist to some extent. The artist extracts meanings from the place. The work is also a kind of metaphor – the house is a medium for an artistic message that the spectator needs to read.

The installation in Pszczyna is placed in the upper part of the facade of a building located in a short distance from the cinema, "Venus" - a former synagogue and other places connected with the presence of Jews in this town in the past. It became an inspiration for putting the inscription both in Polish and Yiddish languages and this way reminding the contemporary citizens of Pszczyna about this aspect of their history.

The artist made the inscription using a stencil technique: "In abandoned houses one can often meet Lilit" (Yiddish: in farlozene hejzer ken men trefen lilis). However, it was not painted, but "cleaned", wiped out of the dirty plaster. Thus the work is a symbolic revitalization of the abandoned building, whose future is uncertain.

For several years Anka Leśniak has been interested to include in her art the role of women in history and the history of art. In this work she used the superstition existing in the Jewish tradition that abandoned houses are haunted by Lilith (Polish: Lilit). The mysteriousness of the installation is emphasized by glossy curtains hung in the windows.

The consultant of the project was Paula Teitelbaum - a lecturer of education programs at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, and the Slowo Zydowskie monthly magazine (Eng. The Jewish Word) provides media sponsorship for its realization.

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