Callousness

[…] The exhibition section focusing on personal and social narratives opens with Karina Marusińska’s painful and intimate work entitled Callousness. It consists of two elements: the audio installation Open Conscience Surgery and the interactive installation Getting Into the Skin, in which the artist returns to her violent childhood. The words coming from the loudspeaker constitute fragments of interviews with the artist’s relatives and friends answering her question (which she was unable to ask directly) about why they never reacted, knowing that her father was using violence against the family. The title of the work describes the artist’s diagnosis of social insensitivity to the suffering of others and the rejection of a sense of personal and social responsibility to help people around us. To remedy this situation, the artist created a library of bruises imprinted on laboratory dishes, which, when applied to the skin, symbolically help to “get into the skin” of victims of domestic violence. Marusińska uses her personal experience of coming out with a painful and intimate story that she hid for years and confronting her loved ones to better understand our contemporary social condition, characterised by a lack of empathy, egocentrism and a sense of alienation. […]

Małgorzata Miśniakiewicz: Concealed. In: Art Reviev SURVIVAL 17. Catalogue, Wrocław 2019, p. 58-59.

photo: Małgorzata Kujda