Sources of Knowledge

The video-installation entitled Sources of knowledge was presented at the “Collage” exhibition in Ptapty in Poznań. It refers to shamanism as the basic form of cognition: defining and labeling the world and surrounding reality.

I am particularly fascinated by the role of art in native, animistic and shamanic cultures, where the very fact of experiencing transcendence is an incentive to creatively record this experience (eg through a pictogram, sign, symbol, language, ritual). I believe that art originates from this spiritual experience.
In my work, the symbolic transcription of trance and shamanic visions of nature and archetypal symbols (e.g. Eye, navel) through the journey is shown in a video where you can see the interpenetrating world of structures and cooperation, the connection between man and archetype and nature, and the possibility of defining the means of that experience.
The second part of the work are symbols drawn on plates filled with water.  Like a well of symbols in it, sources from which we can draw archaic knowledge. The signs I used are taken from the drawings of the shamanic drums – vehicles through which the shaman makes his metaphysical journey. For example (according to the story of a Buryat shaman whom I meet on the Olkhon Island in Lake Baikal in Siberia) the spiral is the initial hot, filter through which the Order, the world of structures in which we live, emerges from Chaos. I also used the theme of a star, shaman, animals – the record of the most being, dependence or rather harmonious coexistence.