Fragile Dreams

Trinkets, fragments, shattered vessels and figurines, seashells kept as souvenirs, as well as occasional tankards, medals, and anniversary trophies—these are the materials Justyna Smoleń has been working with in cycles of collages and ceramic objects created since 2018. The artist uses these objects to critically examine our phantasms—mental constructs that, in psychoanalysis, are understood as projections of desires, fears, and unconscious content. According to Slavoj Žižek, their function lies in masking the contradictions and tensions inherent in every ideology, allowing people to preserve the illusion of a coherent world. They often operate as a defense mechanism, organizing our desires and offering narratives that help us avoid confrontation with the Real—the traumatic and ungraspable aspect of reality.

Through everyday artefacts, Justyna Smoleń explores historical and contemporary phantasms that, in culture and art (including applied art), take the form of idealized images of love, success, or national identity. The artist examines figurines produced in communist countries during the period of political transformation, when images of ballerinas, exotic animals, or idyllic love helped enliven the grey reality and monotony of mass-produced furniture. From porcelain fragments—through associative play and experimentation—she creates hybrid, grotesque forms that critically engage with sentimental notions of romantic interhuman and interspecies relationships, consumerism, and approaches to the body and gender.

In contrast, in the Lava series, filled with organic forms combined with heavy fireplace ceramics, the artist turns her attention to the bubbling, dark sides of the national subconscious, exploring themes related to Sarmatism and fairground folk culture. Figures of crude garden gnomes, boisterous highlanders, miners, or hunting scenes serve her as tools for deconstructing national, patriarchal myths. The exhibition Fragile Dreams reveals the tension between recurring reactionary ideas and attempts to transform them and fluidly create new visions of reality.