I am a body, I feel and experience through my body, I experience it in every aspect of my life.

I am memory.

I want to begin with the body, because it becomes me every day and connects me with reality. Captivated by philosophy, I follow the Athenian Plato and his idea that man is a soul possessing a body. For another philosopher, the Stagirite, the body and soul form a unity in which the body possesses the capacity to act through the soul, to which it gives shape and purpose. Philosophy gives me the ability to understand the world, to describe it, when I don’t have to change it, I can’t even, so I talk about it and about artists who immerse themselves so deeply in who they become and what they are thanks to their bodies.

I browse Artur Turk’s work and see a wonderful thread connecting him with the work of my favorite Austrian artist, the painter and graphic artist Egon Schiele. The starting point for both is Nudity, which becomes an eternal costume cast into an undefined reality, space, alley, or perhaps room. The bodies they depict (through media as diverse as painting, drawing, and photography) appear lonely yet loved, mysterious, and beautiful, and also in agony, revealed to us in the darkest recesses, fragments of life. The bodies in Artur Turk’s photographs are clothed in emotions hidden beneath the skin, hidden in gesture, so that in the end we can see within them the landscapes of the human soul.

Artur and I cry out: “Let us use the body, let us animate it, so that the soul may become immortal. Truly.”

Monika Wachowicz