isomalt, food colouring, hair, solo exhibition Blood and Sugar. Works 2000–2021, Gdańsk City Gallery, 2021
photo: Agnieszka Piasecka

The return to sculpture is even more spectacular than the return to painting. The artist presents last year’s work Pure Water – an object made of isomalt, food colouring and hair. Hair – quite a popular material among artists – even had its own dedicated exhibition a few years ago, By a Hair, at the Zamek Culture Centre in Poznań. In Burska’s work, cut, scattered hair mixed with sugar crystals becomes a visualisation of a collision – almost fetishistic – between beauty and abjection.
The fetishisation of hair even has its own name: trichophilia. The sugar diamonds – red and cream, with red veins running through their centres – in confrontation with the hair become a soft, beautiful object, yet it is hard not to recoil at the sight of this combination. It is interesting that the artist chose two attributes of beauty so deeply entrenched by patriarchy and broke them apart. Diamonds, supposedly a girl’s best friend, and hair, the cutting of which is regarded as a powerful political gesture.
There is a very capacious word that I sometimes recall at different moments: femininity. That is what I see in Bogna Burska’s exhibition – the disenchantment of the impurity of blood and diamonds that can be easily destroyed, symbolically overturning established orders.

excerpt from the text The Principle of Communicating Vessels by Anna Pajęcka, Dwutygodnik, 05/2021

https://www.dwutygodnik.com/artykul/9521-zasada-naczyn-polaczonych.html