{"id":2176,"date":"2025-10-26T16:49:00","date_gmt":"2025-10-26T16:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olgaszynkarczuk.com\/?p=2176"},"modified":"2026-01-20T16:53:22","modified_gmt":"2026-01-20T16:53:22","slug":"reflections-after-do-ho-suh-exhibition-tate-modern-threads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olgaszynkarczuk.com\/pl\/reflections-after-do-ho-suh-exhibition-tate-modern-threads\/","title":{"rendered":"REFLECTIONS AFTER DO HO SUH EXHIBITION @ TATE MODERN – THREADS"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last day of the exhibition and I was determined to see it as well as get my teenage son to see it with me and hopefully get a bit inspired and inspire the next generation. What I did not expect is to be totally and absolutely mermerised by how meticulous, tedious and time intense the process of Suh’s work was. I learned about rubbing which seems like whole another discipline in itself. Watching him and his assistants go through the process blindfolded made me feel quite uncomfortable. I don’t know why. But then seeing the finished works, the sketches, the unbelievable thread “drawings” pressed into the paper, it was magical. I wondered, in order for something to have such huge impact and effect on people, does it always need to be connected to such incredibly tedious and hard work, does only the practice that requires absolute exhaustion make sense in the end? I thought about my own practice, and how painful it sometimes gets to draw\/paint the stripes on a large surface, how incredibly uncomfortable to hold my hand up high for so many hours…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I also thought about his idea of Home, and what does that even mean for many of us, who have lived in more than one place throughout their lives, some of us still constantly commuting between two\/three countries. Especially on this course, with Daniella living between Paris\/Losanne and London, with Sofi commuting between Moscow and other places. I myself have left Poland at 18 and since then lived in San Antonio in Texas, Vancouver in Canada, Los Angeles, New York, Alba in Italy and finally London. While living in all these places I always commuted between them and Warsaw 2-4 times a year. But somehow I don’t see Warsaw as the one and only true home. After over 15 years in London, where my children were born, I come back after the summer in Poland thinking: nice to be back home. But after 1-2 months I get so bored of the routine, I start counting days before the next trip to Warsaw. I am thinking about Suh’s interpretation of the Korean phrase ‘Walk the House’, which he interprets as “how we carry multiple places with us across space and time” as well as his idea that “‘home’ is not a fixed place or a simple idea. Instead, it evolves over time, and is continually redefined as we move through the world.” I see a lot of connection between Suh’s use of colour, my own work and my son’s work. Not sure what that means. For me the use of multiple coloured thread-like lines means two things: one the sentimental connection to the folklore of Poland: the coloured stripes of fabrics used to make folk dancers skirts, the rainbow colours used in paper cutouts telling simple tales of the countryside, the Easter eggs colours, the christmas tree multiple colour paper decorations. On the other hand it means my connection and support od the diversity of the world and the choice of living in a city, in which everyone is able to live freely, without being judged or experiencing discrimination based on superstitions and small. minded thinking. There is a huge juxtaposition as typically the small town and countryside people in Poland tend to be very narrow minded, their beliefs shaped entirely be their devotion to the catholic faith, absolute lack of connection to people of other beliefs, sexual orientatioin or different way of thinking. So there is this very interesting phenomenon of multiple colours\/rainbow colours meaning two completely opposite things. Which is why I am so drawn to using them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also, the threads in Suh’s work bring back the memories of childhood spent alongside my grandmother, always either at her sewing machine, or doing embroidery, or knitting. There weare always muticoloured threads lying around, tangled. And somehow, she always managed to create something utterly beautiful out of that mess.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Last day of the exhibition and I was determined to see it as well as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[174,210,142,8,222,7,98,146,188],"tags":[225,204,223,60,42,52,197,224,227,67,198,226,108,190,199,228],"class_list":["post-2176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-childhood","category-duality","category-emotions","category-exhibitions-art-shows","category-home","category-ideas","category-inspiration","category-relationships","category-threads","tag-displacement","tag-duality","tag-entanglement","tag-environment","tag-home","tag-mental-health","tag-multicolour","tag-multiple-homes","tag-opaque","tag-overwhelmed","tag-rainbow","tag-seethrough","tag-stitching","tag-threads","tag-veil","tag-veiled"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olgaszynkarczuk.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olgaszynkarczuk.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olgaszynkarczuk.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olgaszynkarczuk.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olgaszynkarczuk.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2176"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olgaszynkarczuk.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2177,"href":"https:\/\/olgaszynkarczuk.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2176\/revisions\/2177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olgaszynkarczuk.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olgaszynkarczuk.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olgaszynkarczuk.com\/pl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}