Courtesy of the artist
Structured like a fictional documentary, Crying is the story of a Polish migrant woman, Jolanta, who had settled with her husband Mikołaj on Wiradjuri Country in the Central Tablelands of New South Wales. Through a poetic lens, it is a deeply affecting narrative that tracks the bittersweet process of her assimilation into an emotive landscape teeming with the markers of European imperialism.
A foreigner inhabiting stolen land, she retreats to the pine forest to drink her sadness away, to escape a dream that used to be. Describing her plight is to invoke torch song melodramatics that extract romance from misery, and pathos from times past. Upon entering a clearing in the bushland where the trees have been felled, she witnesses a murmuration of starlings. Their beautiful flock formation is like a black cloud shapeshifting across the sky. Remote and alone, the bird ballet amplifies her newfound isolation in the wake of her failed marriage. Moved to tears, she surrenders to the reality of this foreign place as her abode: “I am at the same time invader, and I am at home”.
Created by the maverick Polish-born Australian artist Kuba Dorabialski, Crying is an aesthetically lush meditation on what it means to experience homesickness on colonised land. A complex and melancholy proposition, Crying speaks to the ungraspable idea of home as a vestige of memory lost to social and cultural displacement.
The impacts of human migration are distilled twofold in Crying: in the bottle and through birds. In the first sense, Dorabialski offers a poetic treatise on alcoholism as a ritual escape valve from life’s traumas. Memory is bonded by alcohol and its consumption through recall or erasure in how we drink to forget or drink to remember. Fevered states of happiness inevitably find solace as waves of grief and nostalgia elsewhere, find expression through booze.
The migratory patterns of bird colonies stand in for invasive human behaviours as Dorabialski’s secondary conceptual distillation. There is a rich tradition of contemporary artists (think Agnes Denes) who have considered migrating birds as a metaphor for human diaspora and colonisation. Starlings, for instance, are a ‘global’ bird species introduced to many parts of the world, including Australia in the mid-1880s. Some descriptions online refer to starlings as ‘introduced’; others term them ‘invasive’. So-called Australia has used similar words to either white-wash or truth-tell its own history of colonisation.
Crying loosely resembles fragments of the artist’s migration narrative. Dorabialski arrived in Australia with his family in 1981 at the age of two and grew up in Campbelltown, in Sydney’s western suburbs. This shared family experience of cultural and linguistic displacement and the flux of nostalgia it engenders animates the leftist political framework of Dorabialski’s practice as an artist, writer and educator. Crying was created in the wake of his ambitious video series Invocation Trilogy (2017–2021). Invocation Trilogy is comprised of three videos: Floor Dance of Lenin’s Resurrection (2017), Seven Revisionists (2018), and the ambitious feature-length work, Connection of the Sticks (2021). Across each part, Dorabialski masterfully presents a sprawling narrative that unpacks the making of meaning, spirituality, superstition, and radical politics. Performed in Dorabialski’s self-invented language—designed to be partly intelligible to most Slavic language speakers—Invocation Trilogy investigates what it means to explore memories, real and distorted, as a migrant who now lives in Australia. Through its uneasy mix of brooding earnestness and absurdist comedy, Dorabialski poses the grand and preposterous question: What is this thing we call Eastern Europe? In contrast with Crying, it is as if the same question is posed, but of Eastern Europe as it is invoked in Australia, or more specifically, the areas where the film and photographic series was shot – Orange, the Central West, and the forests around Mount Canobolas.
Like a hypnotic waking dream, Crying – with its Bacharach-inspired bossa nova score – builds rhythmically to a slow and sleepy release of restorative tears. The Australian landscape is aestheticised through a cinematic visual language that paints it as simultaneously foreign and familiar – a cradle for homesickness whichever way you look at it. The nostalgia generated by homesickness autocorrects memories of the past as inherently idealistic and trauma-free. The problem with nostalgia is that it wallows in yesterday only to confirm the values of a rose-tinted past. A kind of mnemonic propaganda of selfhood standing still. Where Crying is located as an idea, as a dream, is the same place where we can scratch away in the dirt to unearth an idea of home that was never there from the start.
Courtesy of the artist
Curatorial essay for Crying at Verge Gallery, 2023, and expanded for Orange Regional Gallery, 2024.
Published by Orange Regional Gallery in 2024.