Anastasia Rydlevskaya "Where is your face"

The exhibition presents by author Anastasia Rydlevskaya

Anastasia Rydlevskaya is a young artist from Belarus, who lives in Poland. 

Anastasia Rydlevskaya’s project “Where is your face” has two parts: “Home” and “Without Home”. In the first part of this story named "Home", there are two "chapters": "Winter" and "Summer", both of which were created by the artist in her homeland in Belarus, together with her family. 

“They were created in the midst of my mother's blooming rose garden and the fragrant forest planted by my father. The masks saw my mom's wooden tea house, with a lot of fragrant herbs hung inside it, from which my mom then made tea. The masks saw the fields and meadows, the lakes and rivers, which my dad loves so much, they saw the roe deer and the hare that came to our small forest. The masks absorbed the countless dawns that we greeted with my mom and the purring of my tender cat Tootsie: I went downstairs to my mom at 5 in the morning, we brewed coffee and went out to the river with cups and blankets. These masks were created in the best place – my home.”

Forced to leave her home and family, the artist created the second part of the project "Without Home", which appeared already in Poland.

A face is a characteristic that we cannot turn off, that we cannot refuse, the presence of which we cannot cancel. And if the death of the author of a face as a physical finite in the time continuum is real and, moreover, inevitable, then the death of the image of a face is practically impossible. Of the many components, both external and internal, of any person, one of what we will remember will be the face.

Masks in culture have always been an alternative to the constant - a face as that part of the “exterior” of human nature that we cannot hide, from the perception of which we cannot save the society around us. This absolute and the given that we own by default, absolutely independent of us, hides many other much more important characteristics. In fact, a face itself is already a mask for a person.

If in the theater of Ancient Greece masks served to enhance both the visual image and the voice of an actor, then, in this project, the masks, deliberately larger in size than a human face, designed in fantastic bright colors, enhance the voice of the artist and the personality of the characters created by the artist.
 

If the very face of a person is a kind of mask, then, in the project of Anastasia Rydlevskaya, a mask becomes a face. And no longer a head separated from the body, but a whole surrealistic creation, the other parts of which have never existed and will never exist.
 

The history of the creation of the masks is directly related to the political events of 2020 in Belarus, when almost everyone felt like a victim of some kind of violence. These masks are the voices, memories and reasoning of the image of a victim. These are the visual embodiments of those feelings and experiences that many people have in unbearably difficult situations and which, for the reason of condemnation by society, we often have to hide, to hide under the masks of perfect mothers, successful fathers and happy citizens. In this context, the masks by Anastasia Rydlevskaya become the antagonists of their original meaning and expose the real feelings of a human victim, escalating them by means of expressive colors, materials and textures of the works.
 

Each face/mask in the project "speaks" to the viewer. In the description, you will see the text, which is the monologue of a mask character, speaking not with the viewer, but with space and time, blank verse.

The “Where is your face” project, which continues to this day, is a rhetorical question and an attempt to answer it, a reasoning about and a search for the difference and equivalence of the natural and given by nature and the found and sometimes the forcibly acquired.