Agata Grela’s work explores the uncanny through a series of binaries that she encounters in her everyday life, namely: Polish/English, Folkloric Mythology/Historical Truths, Traditional Craft/Modern Technological Processes, Wilderness/Urbanity, Utopian Belief/Nihilism and Reason. In doing so, she explodes these supposed polarities by revealing their dialectical relationships. Places of darkness and perceived infiniteness such as forests and jungles, as well as characters that forcibly remove themselves from their milieus, form an essential backdrop to these explorations (...).
Grela turned towards Polish folklore as a way of challenging her diasporic anxieties by again using the process of the uncanny as a way of exploding the polarity between reality and myth, or the ideology of nationhood and real social relations.
In her other work Agata explores the figure of the Sadhu, in which one sees the appropriation of a figure given supernatural powers by its public, but at the same time relying on social banishment to fulfill this role. By donning the attributes of the Sadhu herself, drawing on close observations during her year spent in India (...), Grela attempts to show the links between sign and meaning as they transform her body into a mythical creature(…). As a Western woman using English materials and modern photographic techniques, Grela’s Sadhu disrupts assumptions about nature and culture whilst unnervingly presenting a critique of the Sadhu’s powers oscillating between farce and ideological reality. By creating a figure simultaneously desirable and repulsive this critique exposes humanity’s need for the unknown as much as creating myths out of what it does not know.
Born 1984, London, UK. Lives and works in London.
Education:
BA (Hons) Fine Art, Chelsea College of Art and Design, London, UK
Diploma in French Language and History of Art, The Sorbonne, Paris, France
Fine Art Foundation, Wimbledon School of Art, London, UK
Selected projects:
2010 Young Polish Art_Metal, Metal Chalkwell Hall, Southend on Sea
2009, The Tomorrow People, Artists of The Future Now, Elevator Gallery, London, UK
2008, Images of Desire, Photography, Virtual Website
2008, The Rookery Hotel, performance based work, London, UK
