Repeating the Time of the Beginning

Lisowski Gallery
2024

Arobala’s Wedding
Marta Czyż

Love is the hardest thing to write about—and yet we do so constantly. It’s an emotion, a state, a type of relationship that remains an endless source of inspiration, and each time we see and describe it differently. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote that love is “watching over another’s solitude.” Marriage crowns love as a fundamental institution in most societies—culturally, religiously, economically, and socially. On the one hand, it is embedded in cultural norms and upholds patriarchal systems; on the other, it is a symbolic and formal agreement between two people, celebrated with their closest kin. A wedding is a liminal experience—beyond birth and death, few events stir such emotion. It is a cultural rite, both spiritual and material, surrounded by gestures and rituals—from the overall process to the couple’s attire.

In Rehearsing the Beginning of Time, we are granted a glimpse into the private story of Bartek Arobal Kociemba. Several years ago, the artist emigrated to Copenhagen for love, and now he celebrates his wedding preparations while transforming them into an artistic project. He explores elements of folk tradition, family stories, and the cultural context he lives in today. These components intermingle. Arobal doesn’t discard traditional symbolism; rather, he immerses himself in it to transform it, adapting it to his own experiences. His personal iconography is rich and, at times, takes on a baroque form. Each symbol is surrounded by a narrative that reaches into history, the titular beginning—or rather, many beginnings—on a personal or family timeline, often rooted in intimate, singular moments.

He rewrites tradition into a visual language embedded in objects associated with a dowry. This dowry forms the core of the exhibition—and after it ends, it will fill the shared marital space. Each item is a handcrafted piece, made by the artist himself, with artisans, or with the public during the exhibition. Their surfaces are filled with elaborate visual stories, centered on the couple and their many portraits, surrounded by symbols—like in Renaissance painting—that describe their relationship and vision of the future: an egg, a swan, cabbage, pickles, a deer. Arobal doesn’t so much modernize these symbols as shift the perspective and interpretation. He queers them, using thoughtful color palettes, aligning them with the upcoming ceremony, inscribing them into a historical continuum while creating a multi-layered narrative that crosses geographical and cultural borders.

Arobal is getting married and sharing his path of preparation with us. He celebrates it by creating a set of objects that speak to the synergy between family heritage, tradition, and his identities. They are infused with mysticism and symbolism, folk elements, Buddha and Slavic deities forming an amalgam of private spiritual practice—one that outlines the future and verbalizes the couple’s desires. The wardrobe in the exhibition is not the “closet” one comes out of, but rather a gateway to celebrating another order. The “masculine” version (traditionally associated with brides) of the dowry chest is adorned with motifs referencing both sexuality and the move from Poland to Denmark. His emigration also sparked a project he continues to this day with Magda Buczek: Vi Lever På Polsk / VLP Gallery. The Danish saying at leve på polsk ("to live Polish-style") means living in a common-law relationship and stems from a time when, during the so-called beetroot migration, Poles came to Denmark for work but couldn’t marry in the Catholic rite in a Protestant country and thus lived in informal unions.

At the exhibition, folk wedding rites play a central role as symbolic crossings of social thresholds—marked by the contemporary issues of access and exclusion. Visitors are greeted with “dębówka,” an oak-infused liqueur made by the artist’s grandfather, who had been saving it for his grandson’s wedding—one that couldn’t, and still can’t, take place in Poland. But this restriction is a modern invention, tied to political radicalism and nationalist religious propaganda that attempts to divide through extreme values and the erosion of social freedoms. Yet marriage, as an ancient construct between man and woman, was already questioned by Plato, for whom love between men ranked highest among forms of love. In The Symposium, he described it in various configurations, noting the virtues of male relationships.

A striking element of the exhibition is a suspended installation made using 3D printing. Created by Arobal’s partner, Danish architect Mikkel Nielsen, it is inspired by straw spiders—holiday decorations from rural homes. Its presence in the show represents Mikkel’s contribution to their shared dowry. Nielsen also draws from tradition, but follows his own rules. The delicate structure of the “Spider” and its flowing forms echo Arobal’s soft line drawings, showing how the couple not only share a private relationship but can also inspire each other in their artistic practices.

In recent years, the art world has seen a surge of metaphors that seek alternatives to established terminologies. At documenta fifteen in Kassel in 2022, the dominant idea was lumbung—a communal rice barn, symbolizing shared resources and collaborative methods. It was one of many terms adopted by ruangrupa to describe curatorial strategies rooted in cooperation and non-obvious connections. In 2023, curator Sebastian Cichocki introduced the term harvesting for EVA International in Ireland, referring to the sowing and gathering of artistic efforts.

Arobal, in turn, chose pickling and fermentation for his artistic project—not as metaphors of stagnation, but as processes that mirror the slow maturation of a relationship. Fermentation, after all, has extraordinary health benefits. For him, building a relationship and a marriage is a mutual marinating: adjusting, blending, and taking on each other’s qualities. From a Buddhist or broader mystical perspective, it could be described as a state of beingness—a shared essence formed from individual characters. Even while remaining distinct individuals, the prolonged pickling of a relationship produces a quality that others may experience too—a quality we long for in separation.

Here again, we return to the symbol of the egg, which in the Renaissance symbolized eternity, infinity, and still today represents new life. For Arobal, it heralds the founding of a family. The egg, too, must be nourished and cared for. Each symbol depicted in his meticulous drawings contributes to a metaphorical narrative about the future marital life and the values that will nurture it. And about beginnings—those he revisits through the objects forming his wedding dowry, a promise of their shared future.

BartekArobal Kociemba

Bartek
Arobal
Kociemba