YAGA
YAGA
Agata Kalinowska
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Baba Yaga is an archetype common to Slavic countries — this being an elderly woman living alone in the woods, surrounded by an animated natural world, the ghosts of her ancestors manifesting as black cats and mean old crows. (…) Baba Yaga, as the embodiment of patriarchal fears, brings to the fore questions of status, resources and norms which must be obeyed. Baba Yaga’s woodland cottage is perched upon chicken legs, symbolising exclusion — being an image of isolation, loneliness, misery and poverty, being also a symbol of opposition and energetic emanation of potential revenge. (excerpt from an essay by Agata Kalinowska)
Yaga constitutes an archetype of a contemporary witch, but YAGA is, above all, an emancipatory idea. Agata Kalinowska’s first publication is a book about freedom – about non-heteronormative standards of attractiveness, age shaming and deconstructing the male-female myths that shape the system. It is also a work about the relationship between beauty and socially imposed female identity. It is about the liberating power of a conscious choice to be excluded, to function outside the confines of norms and the established cultural context – about the isolation that allows one to exist on one’s own terms.
Colophon
Colophon
photography and essay: Agata Kalinowska
sequence: Agata Kalinowska & Łukasz Rusznica
book design: Agata Bartkowiak
colour proofing and prepress: Krzysztof Krzysztofiak
curatorial work: Łukasz Rusznica
editing of the text in English:
printing and binding: Argraf, Warsaw
printed on paper: Arctic Volume Ivory
typeset: Warnock
binding: hardcover
number of pages: 176
publisher: BWA Wrocław Galleries of Contemporary Art
partner: TIFF Festival
language of publication: Polish, English
year of production: 2021
edition: 500
ISBN: 978-83-63505-50-9
weight: g
size: 20 ×26,5 cm
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Press
Conscientious Photography Magazine:
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