Anka Dabrowska

A Place In-Between

The Primark Building

Private View: Friday 25th of June 6.00 - 9.00

Exhibition Runs: 26th of June - 26th of July

Artist Anka Dabrowska brings her delicate drawings and assemblage sculptures to Margate for the first time this summer, through a residency at the Margate School, culminating with an exhibition at the old Primark building.

A fitting setting for her practice based and site specific research project ‘A Space In-between’ which ruminates and emerges from her experience of the residency in Margate. Not only as an architectural urban landscape, swelling on the cliff sides of the South coast of England, but also as a peoples and multitude of cultures in tension and coalition, present and past, as we move into the future post pandemic.

Anka’s work assembles itself in these polarities as her materiality is of remnant findings of the exact constructions of urban sites that serve or deny us, that are breached or acquired, developed for or excluding demographics of locals new and old.

In a world of outsiders, immigrants and transience we are continually confronted with the space that is filled with other peoples memories, our own impressions, buildings with intentions and opportunities that are open to some and closed to others.

Anka is perfectly situated to navigate this role of urban anthropologist as her own experience of domestic dwellings, urban spaces, and survival are expansive. Having migrated across borders of countries, class, gender and sexual identity. She is a self proclaimed outsider and this is one of her powers, to connect the dots of human ecologies as she does with the ink that creates her delicate drawings of organic life forms.

Life forms in contrast to the assemblage structures that echo her memory as interpretation of the spaces she visits. Scraps of wood, foam and insulation, heterogeneous material from building sites, skips and back yards are reconstructed to create small scale impressions of the structures of our urban lives. In concrete there is breath, air that penetrates brutalist sedimentary structures that house human existence.

Colour is a retaliation to mass construction and development, as words are sprayed onto wood chip and solid dust, poetry of hope and of dismay, of actualisation and rebellion from the classes below the invisible line of economic hierarchy.

Through her inclusion of graffiti and slogans, the power of voice and of art making are embedded in her structures; the writing is on the wall, as is Anka’s nature for protest, activism and showing up for community.

Anka has been collecting stories as an oral archive from local residents as they share what they want to on the subject of Margate and specifically Arlington House and the old Lido site.

An archive that will be played as a soundscape to the 3D installation of structures and drawings in the Place In-between.

Words by Lo Lo No @doublesidedstickytape

https://www.themargateschool.com/post/place-in-between-q-a-with-anka-dabrowska-and-lo-lo-no

Exhibition visitors and collectors. June-July 2021.

“A Place In-Between” exhibition opening evening 25/06/21 at The Old Primark Building, Margate High Street.