In a small garage in the middle of a residential neighbourhood, Monika Gabriela Dorniak enters into a similar dialogue with the exhibition space. She looks for unexpected nooks and corners to relay a story of intergenerational trauma, migration, and belonging. In Stroboskop, an independent artist-run art space operating in the garage beneath an apartment block since 2016, Dorniak’s exhibition titled u-u-u, i have a request for you!, brings together objects brought by her father in the 1980s and 90s from Poland to Germany, where she grew up in a village that was also a former WWII site, with the artist’s own body of work in which she explores humanity’s place in the Anthropocene. In her research, stones, wood, and a mixture of fluids engage in a crystallising process, thus rendering visible synthetic cycles of growth, dislocation, and relocation, notions that reflect the impact of war.
Through these objects, the exhibition as a whole becomes a site of remembrance, a 'murmuring field' as described in the accompanying text, not just by projecting or discovering the past but also by observing material transformation. In her work, a book becomes an actual shelter, a jar is filled with memories, and a stone does, in fact, grow. The exhibition subtly shows how an unconventional space is able to transform itself over and over again, beyond its original purpose, and to become a vessel for the unexpected each time. The fact that Stroboskop has existed as an independent, non-commercial art space for almost ten years is again proof of a genuine joy for art despite, as Katie Zazenski, who has been running the space since 2018, tells me, facing literal obstacles many times throughout the years.