Tatiana Wolska - Standby (2024)

Tatiana Wolska (b. 1977, lives and works in Brussels) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work consists of drawings on paper and installations and sculptures that, since the beginning of her artistic career, she has made from found wood and materials saved from the rubbish bin. She grew up in Poland, a communist state at the time, where the scarcity of resources meant that ‘everything was reused and transformed’, something that still inspires her work today.

Wolska uses these materials to create poetic works of art that often consist of a multitude of the same object: from nails and discarded panels to plastic bottles and branches. She manipulates these in a repetitive way, producing organic, sometimes freakish sculptures that appear to swell up in the air or to exist as parasites on trees and bushes or to grow out of walls.
Whether these works are constructed from elements that have been fused, glued or nailed together, they rarely form a seamless whole. This includes the work Standby, an extensive, 11-metre-long installation that Wolska created in situ for ARBOS. The work, which alludes to similar installations that she previously made in Nice and Brussels, offers a reflection on a social utopia and is a continuation of her ongoing research into what she describes as nomadic, democratic and relational architecture, which makes use of what is available in the immediate surroundings. With Standby Wolska offers visitors a chance to unhurry, to take a break, to lie down.

Perhaps the material and the construction method make the work reminiscent of barricades. Or maybe the location evokes nostalgic memories of building a den. Is it about the safe feeling of retreating somewhere? For Wolska, Standby reflects ‘the most primal and elementary gesture of humankind: seeking shelter’ – the bitter necessity of which is underlined in news articles on a daily basis.