Woman’s Inner Ecology

Monika Misztal’s new series of works, Woman’s Inner Ecology in the 21st Century, comprises fifteen paintings, in various formats, focusing on the subject of violence against women. Not the hard-core violence, however, such as beating or rape, but the subtler type revealed in gestures, grimaces and ostensibly neutral verbal expressions. The type of violence on the edge of the unwanted and the exciting and desired. Like her previous series, Porno-erotyki [Porn-Love-Pieces], representing women’s blurred faces in moments of extasy and arousal filling up the entire frame of a painting, Woman’s Inner Ecology depicts women in relation to male desire which, besides satisfaction, brings humiliation and pain as well. A fixed element in these paintings is a man’s hand that bores through the image and guides the viewer’s gaze. The hand seems to be emerging from behind the frame and grabbing from the back, by the hair, by the neck, stifling, pressing into tissues, causing pain and discomfort. The hand is also a reminder that, for women, the regime of pleasure is inextricably connected to the regime of subjugation and submission. Why is sex so often linked with violence? As demonstrated by the recently widely publicly discussed question of the #MeToo movement, women’s equality remains a stake to be won. As much as it might have seemed that, after the first and second waves of feminism, their affairs have been handed over to women, the question of #MeToo has made us aware that sexuality is one of the most glossed over and invisible areas, where men’s domination and violent behaviour towards women and women’s towards men can develop beyond any control whatsoever. For Monika Misztal, the issue of violence bears a fundamental significance. Her pieces continually titter on the thin boundary between pleasure and things which destroy and can, at any moment, transform into violence. As in her series Głody [Hungers], where the artist, painting the texture of food (eggs, cheese, bacon), referred to a very haptic pleasure of eating, while the texture and colour of the paintings, which frequently showed eating in a hyperbolic blow-up, produced revulsion and disgust. Those painting refer to a bulimic obsession, where an excessive consumption relates to an equally expressive excretion, making bulimia another issue which binds women to the male gaze regime of pleasure. The aforementioned Porno-erotyki [Porn-Love-Pieces], in turn, depict porn actresses whose distorted faces are staring vacantly into space, leaving the viewer uncertain as to whether the scene they are seeing is one of orgasmic rapture, or a sequence of violence, contained and muffled by a glass pane of the screen. The equivocality, precisely, is what makes Misztal’s works simultaneously cause discomfort and provoke.   
The titular ‘inner ecology’ alludes to Felix Guattari’s notion of ecology as ecosophy, a complete philosophy comprising both human relationships with nature as well as inter-human relationships and a human’s relationship with themselves. “Ecology,” the artist writes, “is setting boundaries, saying ‘stop’ to destructive behaviours, it is a science, a training in demeanour, a sensitisation to another’s sensitivity, an unobvious one, buried under layers, under a cover. It isn’t taking, but giving, supporting, nurturing, so one can grow, develop.” For Misztal, as for Guattari, a non-ecology of two people’s relationship derives from the human’s exploitative approach to the Earth, a foundation which has led humanity to the brink of the climate crisis and the annihilation of the human as a species. At its foundation lies the human’s consumerist attitude to the environment – a foundation which takes, giving nothing in return, and abandons when there is no more to be taken. The world in which love has been replaced with sex, while sex has become nothing but another species of consumption. 
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Magda Lipska 
kuratorka/ curator 
Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie/ Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw