The Kitchen as a Metaphor for the Discomfort of Emigration

• In Event: Art, Liberation, and the Emigration Experience

Abstract

In my presentation, I discuss Elżbieta Jabłońska’s performance Kuchnia [The Kitchen] (2003), which took place at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein. As its central element, the performance staged an over-scaled kitchen constructed for Polish emigrant women (huge numbers of Polish women would go abroad to work during the post-1989 transition). Excessively elevated cupboards, awkwardly arranged worktops, and a table with overly high legs made kitchen chores difficult and metaphorically rendered the distress of unwilling emigration with its social and psychological consequences. The women evoked by Jabłońska experienced a dissonance resulting from the coercive crisis situation they faced. The paradox of their position was that in order to take care of their homes, they actually had to abandon them and emigrate to take care of other people’s lives.

Author

• Dorota Koczanowicz, U of Wrocław (Poland)