Tomasz Sikorski’s body land performances bring home back to a bio-deterministic point in time – the artist’s body - upside down merging into the land. It is a kind of living way of presenting what home is performatively speaking. In the middle of a forest area close to a red and white Polish border land marker, Sikorski has set up overhead banners that declare a START, a place of entrance to the forest. At the other end, we can read a second banner that simply has the word META on it. Once we are on our way in the centre of this “conceptually delineated space”, we become aware that seen from inside, the signs read META at both ends, as if we were metaphorically trapped by this “state of being”. Sikorski’s installation suggests our notion of Home could as readily be a meta-state as it could be a concept. It is all in the way we interpret it all. Or is it possible nature was (and still is) our real primordial Home, one that existed (and still does) before all the constructs and ideational interpretations came into being? At another secluded sanctuary-like site, Sikorski’s Never Now presents a grave with a mirror facing upwards to the skies. Death as metaphor for home, or for our unpreparedness for death when it comes, Sikorski’s modest yet powerful action recalls his late father, who escaped from Warsaw during the 1944 uprising through the sewers of the city, and so Sikorski’s Escape, a blue circle that circumscribes a patch of ground as a point of connectivity to other places, other times, other world, is contemplative, searching, a gesture of acceptance and letting go.
John K Grande, 2016
