Katarzyna Mirczak
Abysses
After digging deep into the archives of the departments of forensic medicine in Krakow and Wroclaw, Katarzyna Mirczak has delved into the cabinets of institutions specializing in examining and treating sleep disorders. In her new project, the author of the Special Signs and the Tools of Crime submitted herself to night-long polysomnography tests, conducted at the Sleep Disorders Center at the Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology in Warsaw. As a result of the medical analysis (EEG, EEA, EMG, ECG, blood oxygen saturation level, respiratory movements of chest and abdomen etc.), a detailed description – the sleep profile of the artist – emerged. In Abysses, it is reinterpreted and inscribed into the field of music and visual arts.
A multi-channel medical documentation of one of the REM phases of Katarzyna Mirczak’s sleep constituted a starting point for her new works. Together with Poznań-based composer Rafał Zapała, Mirczak has created a spacial sound installation, occupying almost the entire gallery space. The medical images of the eyeballs movement were also utilized in images which evoked the atmosphere of the artist’s previous realizations. Fascinated by the mathematic structure of the world, Katarzyna Mirczak consciously catalizes a cognitive tension between the objective and the scientific on the one hand, and the irrational and the subjective on the other. By combining science, new media and her individual experience, she searches for new order, tenderness in chaos.
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