Tuesday, December 30, 2008
A Polish Encounter
by Nicola Carley: www.petitenicole.blogspot.com
By the time the last week of February dawned, I had made friends with Jerome - another Canadian guy who had been staying in the Auberge and who, like me, had outstayed his welcome. He introduced me to the hostel just around the corner, which was great as it meant I only had a short distance to drag my possessions and they even had a lift! It felt as though I was beginning a new era as myself and my volunteers moved my god knows how many kilos worth of bags and bits. This excitement was soon dampened a few days later when I was told that the only bed available that night was a mattress on the floor in a room which already had one resident – or sharing the double bed with them.
The next morning I happened to be passing Starbucks on the start of another day scouring for jobs when, through the glass I noticed a girl I thought I recognised sitting in the window. Looking warm with a long heavy coat, dark, Eastern European looks with the almost compulsory highlights they often seem to have in their hair, which shadowed half of her face and her wide deep eyes. She sat inside, working on an Apple Mac, as I stood freezing on the outside and I realised the reason I recognised her is because she too had been staying in the Auberge. I had never really noticed her before, being the quiet observer of the social experiments around her, choosing not to participate.
I pushed the door open, walked over and introduced myself.
“Hi, I’m Nicola. I was staying in the same hostel as you the other day but I never had an opportunity to speak to you really.
“Oh, yes. Of course I remember. You are the English girl in the hat.”
Yeah. I guess that’s me. I thought it needed a rest today.
“My name’s Nicola.”
“Hi, I’m Monika Adler. I’m from Poland.”
“So, what are you doing in Paris?”
“To be honest? I guess there are many reasons really, but more than anything, it’s that someone opened the door, just a crack, onto potentially, a whole new life. It opened to show me something with a beautiful exterior but not enough for me to be able to scratch beneath it so, here I am. Scratching!”
I wondered if I could also use that as an excuse to explain the awful state of my nails after living in a hostel for almost two months.
“You?”
“I’m an artist and I have an exhibition here in Paris, just off the Rue de Rivoli, close to the Louvre.” She said, handing me a flyer. “I know some of the other artists working here in Paris and my friend agreed to loan me his exhibition space for a few weeks. Their art isn’t much good, they are all too obsessed with their own penises to see much beyond that but the relationship works for me at the moment.” She said, with a look of disdain.
“You should come along and take a look at my work. I’m there everyday from 1pm to around 7pm.”
“Cool. I will do. I have to do some job-hunting in the morning but I could pop by in the afternoon.”
Her blog today (December 2008) reads:
OFFICIAL BLOG OF MONIKA K. ADLER - AN INTERNATIONAL ART ICON
Monika K. Adler was born on January 5th. She is an artist, entrepreneur, self-promoter, a charismatic & ultra fashionable icon of varied interest and diverse subject of art. Adler graduated from the School of Fine Arts ( Art & Design ) and the European Academy of Photography in Warsaw/Poland : Creation & Expressionism. Her works have been exposed in exhibitions around the world and published in prestigious trade magazines. She lives & works between Paris and NYC.
Like many artists, she sees herself as a work of art or as she calls herself – an international art icon. A glance at her own blog posts and the self-photography there and it would be easy to write her off with an over-inflated ego, something that becomes obvious when photographs of dog turds are suggested as being ‘art’ paying homage to DuPont's 'throne'. However, beyond this egotism lies a sharp intelligence displayed in some of her pieces with a real passion to question society and lead society to question itself.
One critic writing on her blog said:
“To really understand Monika K. Adler’s art you have to put yourself above the social borders and political thoughts you know as everyday rhetoric, you have to open your mind and see the entire world in a single shot because behind every image is a very deep philosophy with its own arrogance, irony, romanticism, sadness, rebellion for freedom and change.”
Or at least that’s what I saw when I visited the gallery the next morning and first laid eyes upon her ‘Chef-de-oeuvre’ Mademoiselle Guillotine in life size.

Looking beyond the mirror, the following are my thoughts on the work however informed/mis-informed they may be…
The Unspoken Word
Monika K. Adler was born in Poland. She graduated from the School of Fine Arts and the European Academy of Photography in Warsaw, Poland. Her works have been shown in scores of exhibitions in Eastern Europe and published in trade magazines but Monika wanted to reach Western Europe and it seems in that world, to make it as an artist, you must be willing to not only sell your pictures but also your soul.
I was struck however, by the poignancy in this picture of ‘Mademoiselle Guillotine’ - saturated with signification. Having just come from London and a political climate of War and pro-human rights, this picture spoke volumes. In the UK recently, there seems to have been an increasing awareness of the subordination of women in many countries and the many forms it takes; from the killing of baby girls in China to female castration in Africa and the Taliban’s regime of the degradation of women. Monika’s pictures seem to give a voice to these women.
Many artists portray the naked female body with a submissive quality; laid back poses, paintings of women naked with their babies and women relaxing in the nude or portraits to be hung over a mantelpiece. The talent in Monika’s pictures lies in her ability to retain the femininity of the female and at the same time, show the innate power that lies within it. In this image, the power of the naked female body - far from subordinate - is a strong dichotomy in the masked girl. The Western and Eastern symbols of femininity fight with such intensity that on first view, a sharp intake of breath may be required.
These symbols however, the burkha and stiletto shoes are superceded by her naked sex; the defiant, provocative stance - her legs are not bound to keep them open - along with the expression in the eyes and the stiletto shoes fights against the masking of the face and the hands tied behind the back. Her ‘gaze’ taunts the voyeur to look her in the eye, to look away from her nakedness and into her soul. To look at her and regard the authoritarian, totalitarian male – war, rape and the brutalisation of a people, inferred by the symbols in the piece.
This image gives a voice to those women who cannot speak for themselves. It speaks against those forces that cover the female body and put it under wraps for exactly the reason displayed in this picture; the female body has a dangerous power. It can reduce some men to a helpless state, physically and emotionally inferior in that moment to the woman hence ‘feminine’ denotes in this picture, the very opposite of the dictionary definition. The rhetoric is a search for truth as it battles the stereotypes of feminity.
Religious and cultural dialectics are expressed in the stark ironies of the Burkha style mask in contrast with the naked genitalia and the world wide symbol of aid – The Red Cross - creates a context of War - in this picture, is not helping the woman from her binds. The photograph speaks against censorship. Against the binds that society places on women. Even in the Western world, the BBC will allow film of men with flaccid penises but a woman’s sex cannot be shown.
It may be a Western woman’s ‘choice’ to wear stilettos but nevertheless, it is a conformity to the male’s view of what constitutes sexuality - something that is celebrated in the Western world. In the East, women conform whether by choice or otherwise, to the male-dominated culture and wear burkha. Covering up what is deemed to be ‘dangerous’ there: a woman’s face and body, Monika might fear for her life in Saudi-Arabia for creating such a work.
It would be easy to write this off as an insult to women the world over. Through the dialectics in Mademoiselle Guillotine polarised cultures are transcended to bring together both East and West. It is a comment on Paris where the muslim ‘emigrant’ of countries such as Algeria and Morrocco meets the Western female in a sepia tone, nostalgic of a past long gone in the narrative of this photograph. Long live matriarchy!
From that moment, for this image, it moved me deeply enough that I pledged my allegiance to Monika K. Adler and it is in the juxtaposition of this with the ‘ideal’ image of Paris that it becomes ever more powerful such as this entitled ‘idyllic Paris’.

Her work can be viewed at
http://www.monika-k-adler.com
http://www.adler-photography.com
Robbie was entirely repelled by her. He thought her predatory, egotistical and vacuous but I saw another side. Predatory or not, I felt that her work had something powerful to say.
Posted by It's all in the text at 7:34 AM 0 comments