Bronia Iwanczak: The artist as mental ecologist
Bronia Iwanczak is a mental ecologist, a monitor of the pervasive cultural toxicity that characterises contemporary life in the West. Her art practice is motivated by a profound concern for what might be called the soul-sickness of current Western society – including the turn away from spiritual values, the fracturing of the self, and the disavowal of grief, that manifests itself in cultural and psychic pathologies, such as emotional alienation and increasing ethnic and racial intolerance. Her work has also consistently addressed the role that technological mediation plays in this cultural landscape. In her complex installations, Iwanczak does not work literally nor ethnographically, but through spatial and aesthetic strategies that suggest links between personal, cultural and political phenomena, that focus the viewer’s attention on the relationship between their inner subjective worlds and outer “objective” worlds.