The gift of death, the gift of life

Joanna Zylinska

The condition of life under late capitalism is often described as “precarious”: we hear references to precarious labour in the globalised market; a precarious future facing retirees, students and prospective house-buyers; the precarious lives of refugees and illegal immigrants. The political condition of instability and insecurity is also underpinned by a metaphysical sense of the transience of things, one that led German philosopher Martin Heidegger to describe being in the world as “being-toward-death”.

Alicja Dobrucka’s evolving practice, temporarily stabilised and collected in her recent project, “I like you, I like you a lot”, powerfully encapsulates this double meaning of precariousness. Ostensibly a reflection on the artist’s and her family’s bereavement after the sudden tragic loss of her younger brother, the work opens up the personal space of mourning to broader affects and questions about vulnerability, youth, motherhood, domesticity and the passage of time. In one sense, Dobrucka’s project remains in explicit dialogue with that quintessential text on photography and death: Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, in which the French writer mourns the passing away of his dear mother, while also anointing photography with a funereal mark for generations of artists and critics to come.

Yet Dobrucka also seems to achieve something different with her work. While facing and confronting death - tearfully, anxiously, despondently, perhaps even angrily - she also creates openings in the wall of mourning by letting the light in. The personal domestic spaces and objects presented in the images become vehicles for a transitional journey from the familiar to the unknown, a journey of maturation for both individuals and a whole generation. It is this generational aspect that anchors the project. Rather than being about the passage of time, and of life, everywhere, every time, the work takes as its focus a group of central European youths in a small urban-rural locality, on their way to a fuller, more mature, life.

The landscape shots included in Dobrucka’s project seem to a play on the memento mori theme so prominent in art, with mors giving way here to tender vulnerability. The leaning tree, the wavering reed, the passing shafts of light, are both reminders of transience and props for the viewer’s own anxious and wounded self. In this way, the artist turns the realm of personal tragedy into a safe space in which we can all experience the precariousness of life: safely, vicariously, at one remove. The square format images become containers for this experience: a magic boxes that give us back vitality - which we should grab while we can.

Joanna Zylinska is a Reader in New Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, a cultural critic and a fine art photographer. Her most recent book is Bioethics in the Age of New Media.