“Mama” is the latest series of photographs by Aneta Grzeszykow­ska, which presents her daugh­ter in the activities with silicone sculpture-​doll – a hyper-​realistic image of the head and body of her mother-​artist. Photographs – color­ful archival and black and white prints, original barite prints – are arran­ged in sequen­ces of events – the scene of burial of the title sculp­ture in the garden begins and ends the series. This seduc­tive and on many levels distur­bing story is charac­teristic for the artist and reminds of her previous (and probably also future) projects. This cor­responds with the dynamics of human life in which suc­ces­sive events arise from one another. “Art is a process shaped by life – not the other way around,” says the artist.  “Mama” takes as its star­ting point one of the fun­damen­tal social relations – the relation­ship of mother and daugh­ter. Grzeszykow­ska creates a poignant camera per­for­mance in which her daugh­ter animates the sculp­tural image of her mother. In this way, clas­sical roles are rever­sed, here we observe the child in the causative role. The mother becomes a doll, and the artist passes her role to her daugh­ter – giving over her own qualities, temp­tations and creative ambitions.

This scenario laun­ches a range of cul­tural and visual associations, from the fetishistic figure of the woman/doll, through psychoanalysis and sur­realism, per­for­mance of the artist’s own body as an image, object and sculp­ture, to a feminist re-​examination of the agency of the woman/mother. As in ear­lier works by Grzeszykow­ska, her discom­posed body is a metaphor for absence, escape from the body as the “pac­kaging of life,” and another chap­ter in a tale of vanishing. The artist remains loyal to the treat­ment of art as a field of existen­tial experien­ces. With her work she also alludes to the call by the philosopher Luce Irigaray, which on the artist’s lips sounds like a self-​fulfilling promise: “Our daugh­ters must sym­bolically bury our experience in order to create a new situation for women.”