gallery > installations > “Walizka mojego Taty“
Daddy’s suitcase or “Walizka mojego Taty“ confronts the necessities of immigration, how memory modifies that journey and how it is relived again by later generations. In searching for our identity, it is assumed that we look to the experience of our preceding family and retrace their journeys to make sense of our present.
Placing dislocated identity in historical context is neither an easy or necessarily comfortable experience. Childhood rationalisation of the foreignness of ones parentage in class driven and fundamentally xenophobic England sought to gloss over the funny accents and dismiss the alien idiosyncrasies.
Celebration of heroism is old hat but recognition of the struggle to survive and the fight for the freedoms and liberty now exercised in Europe need to be reinvigorated. It is not that I would elevate my father to sainthood or to class all contemporary Polish immigrants as economic. Their journeys are closely linked in time and space. The possibility of one is dependent upon the realisation of the other.