Kinga Araya. Walking with Kinga

Kinga Araya’s project Walking with Kinga is based on the concept of walking and talking, which the artist has been developing over the years. The result is a multicultural activity which encompasses places in Italy, Poland and Hungary with links to the history of Saint Kinga as well as the artist herself. During her preparation for the exhibition over the period of a year and a half, the artist has talked with academics and people from different professions and different social classes, including men of the cloth. She engaged in discourse in various languages with people from culturally diverse places. In the process, she collected a record of local worship and tradition.

In her work Araya, an artist and art historian, combines the academic aspect of the project with visual arts such as activities in public space, multimedia presentations, video and audio recordings as well as sculptures and installations. The artist’s approach is interdisciplinary; theory and practice, life and art intermingle and are deeply rooted in each other.

The artist used as the starting point the story of her patron saint – Saint Kinga. She collected evidence of the continuing worship of the saint, visiting places related to her story and her cult. She perceives Saint Kinga as a remarkable woman, a princess, a migrant and the initiator of cultural, political and economic changes. In her art, Araya reflects on the link between the circumstances of the Hungarian princess with her own story – that of a Polish woman, an immigrant, someone who faced the challenge of living in foreign countries.

Kinga Araya critically reflects on aspects of hybrid identity, on multicultural suspension, on constant moving from one place to another, on emigration; and especially on the lack of a tangible motherland. The artist examines to what extent the necessity to function in a foreign language creates an obstacle to communication. The exhibition represents a critical autobiography of Kinga Araya – visual, spoken and written in English, Polish, Italian and Hungarian.

Kinga Araya is a citizen of both Canada and Poland. She lives and works in Rome in Italy. She studied at Ottawa University, York University in Toronto and Concordia University in Montreal, where she was awarded a PhD for her thesis entitled Walking in the City: The Motif of Exile in Performances by Krzysztof Wodiczko and Adrian Piper. Currently, she is writing a book entitled The Post-exilic Condition: the Poetics and Politics of Walking.

Kinga Araya has received numerous awards and stipends, such as: Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (Canadian Embassy in Warsaw, 2002), Renata Hornstein Graduate Fellowship in Recognition of Superior Academic Achievement (Concordia University, 2003), Recherche et création: Bourse “B” (Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, 2005), Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 2006), Postdoctoral and Artistic Fellowship (ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, 2007).

The key questions in Araya’s research are migration, travel and return. She analyses the condition of an individual disconnected from their roots, who attempts to adapt in spite of communicating in a foreign language. The artist usually makes the focus of her attention an individual who, as a result of the context, on the one hand, has benefited, but, on the other, has been handicapped. In her performances, Araya evokes the symbolism of prosthetics with which she confronts herself as a participant in a performance, but she also draws general implications – at times, relevant for larger social groups.

Opening 12 January 2012, 6pm; to 26 February 2012.