AUDIO DESCRIPTION #1
WELCOME
Kuba Dorabialski, Crying because it always works out, annoyingly, 2023, Pigment print on cotton rag, 50cm x 50cm. Image courtesy of the artist.
ID: The artwork is of a quarry pit. At the bottom of the image, is a small mound of various sized rocks stacked unevenly upon each other in approximately three rows on a flat dirt ground, running from left to right. There is a small even gap either side between the rock mound and edges of the photograph. The rocks are light in colour and in front of a dip with a straight dirt quarry wall rising behind it. In the distance, behind the quarry wall, you can see the tops of a row of dark grey pine trees against a clear light grey sky. The perspective is at eye-level – looking straight at the quarry wall. The rocks are in the bottom half of the photograph, and the quarry wall, trees, and sky are in the top half. This location is a gravel quarry near Mount Bindo, Hampton State Forest, Wiradjuri Country.
Crying
Kuba Dorabialski
Curated by Daniel Mudie Cunningham
August 17 - September 22 2023
Verge Gallery, University of Sydney, Gadigal Country
Welcome to the exhibition, ‘Crying’, by artist Kuba Dorabialski. This exhibition was curated by Daniel Mudie Cunningham. The exhibition dates are 17 August to 22 September 2023, at Verge Gallery, University of Sydney, Gadigal Country.
We acknowledge the Wiradjuri people, the traditional custodians of the land on which this exhibition was developed, and the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, the traditional custodians of the land on which the gallery operates. We recognise that sovereignty was never ceded. We pay our respects to all First Nations people across the world, acknowledging and respecting their relationship with land.
‘Crying’ is a solo exhibition of photographs, sculpture, and video by Kuba Dorabialski. The exhibition explores themes of unabashed emotion, romantic love, geographic and cultural displacement, and starlings, an invasive bird species introduced into Australia in the 19th century. The exhibition poses the question, “What does it mean to be homesick on colonised land?”.
The work takes the structure of a fictional documentary and tells the story of a Polish migrant living on Wiradjuri Country and the bittersweet process of her assimilation into a landscape that teems with so many markers of European imperialism. The video and photographs predominantly feature pine plantations.
Kuba is an artist, filmmaker, and educator originally from Wrocław, Poland. He works primarily in video installation, and is a PhD candidate and lecturer at UNSW, Art and Design. Kuba is interested in mysticism, political history, and the personal poetic; his tools are geography, language, dance, and cinema history. He has exhibited in the US, Europe, and Australia, and is in the Artbank collection. He won the John Fries Award in 2017, the Fisher’s Ghost Art Award, Open Category, in 2019 and exhibited ‘Invocation Trilogy’, a video series, at Carriageworks, Sydney in 2021. His first feature film, ‘Connection of the Sticks’, had its cinema premiere at Sydney Film Festival in 2023.
The gallery space is divided roughly into two halves. The half furthest from the entrance is dimly lit and contains a large video projection accompanied by music. The music is concentrated near the video but is audible throughout the entire space. The other half of the gallery where you enter is well lit and displays 20 square black and white photographs on four pale grey walls. The photographs are within sculptural frames.
For accessibility, audio descriptions of selected artworks are available and can be accessed via wall mounted QR codes near the corresponding artwork. Tactile floor markings, detectable by cane, are positioned directly below these QR codes.
These audio descriptions were developed in collaboration with the artist Kuba Dorabialski by Sarah Barron and Sarah Empey, and aim to provide enhanced accessibility for all visitors, including those who are blind or have low vision.