In the Afterimage project, a socialist realist office building built in Katowice in place of the Silesian Museum in the 1950s was a source of conversations that wove together private stories and the official story. To find the right point of view on this building, the artist entered private homes, probing her and others’ boundaries of courage, kindness or trust. In turn, in the action I Would Also Like to Tell You That… (2016), carried out in trains, the artist encouraged passengers to leave the train and catch the return train to meet with the person they saw before leaving, to tell that person that which is always impossible to say, as there is never an opportunity or a right time to do so.
During her residency in Birmingham in 2017, Karina Marusińska collaborated with the local community, and this collaboration resulted in the installation Good Visibility, made up of glass panels painted by the project participants. By kick-starting and stimulating their imagination, the artist tried to convince them to believe in change, to trust their own abilities.
Another work carried out during this residency was Viewpoint, a PVC curtain with a print, hanging in public space, subtly distorting the view behind it. Through this installation, the artist voiced her opinion in the discussion about fake news, which increasingly often appears in public debate.
In 2016, thanks to the exhibition A Part For The Whole, Marusińska in a way cracks down on design, with which she has been quite often identified so far. As she emphasises in an interview with Katarzyna Roj:
If you suddenly get too much of something, you throw it up just as quickly. That is how I would describe my attitude toward design today. Design – an empty shell. That being said, the design period in my creative activity was very much needed. The fact that I am not dealing with it now is also very adequate. I want to make that clear. But my fascination with the relationship between man and his physical environment has not changed. What changed is the language in me that I use to describe this relationship. Thanks to this, I am facing the entire material culture differently [...]. This time, I give up on extracting the noble qualities of the material, called white gold. Instead, I put a black fern under my magnifying glass, pulled out from under the doormat of our hyper-hygienic life.
The exhibition included ceramic sculptures of amorphous shapes (sharing the title of the exhibition), which evoke associations with the remains or waste of the human body, although the starting point for the artist was the form of the digestive system, the intestines – the road through which the consumed goods pass. Agnieszka Wolny-Hamkało tried to describe these sculptures, using terms that indicate what may appear to be awkward, repulsive or displaced:
The forms resemble dirt and excrement. Is that ‘part of the whole’? Our excrement, our leftovers? Is this supposed to tell a story about us? I like this distorted mirror. After all, we are born between excrement and urine and we try to escape from it all our lives. Karina Marusińska's exhibition shows us our humanity, the poverty of the subject, who is a ‘fragile and deceitful case’. The artist restores what has been displaced: the edges of the body, the taboo sphere – mucus, urine, excrement, menstrual blood, sweat – body secretions, violating the integral position of inside / outside (of the body).
A Part For The Whole, like the previous works From Prosperity To The Anus, Through The Anus To Non-Existence (2014) or Object With a Hole (2014), is situated in the area of shameful carnality, where the discourses of filth and hygiene collide.