Tenant
Cracow, 30.11.2024 - 15.01. 2025
There are better tenants: friendly to the world, ready for any adventures, with respect for boundaries and a devout attitude to common space. Steamer is a tenant-challenger: perpetually hungry, of poor health, not fond of visitors. Insulting and judgmental, he makes contact with a select few and only when he himself feels like it, he can be demonic at times.
There were other possibilities. There were two cats in the basket that Janek brought from a neighbor, but he was the one who decided to climb into Irena's lap and fall asleep, thus sealing the eternal lease. So for years, where the house, there's the Steamer. And where the house, there - for Irena - the studio. Parówka, in turn, not at all involuntarily, became a tenant of successive realities that Irena called into existence.
A purebred art cat remains a cat: sleeping soundly in the middle of a situation that should immediately turn into a frame, examining strange objects brought home, curling up in a ball in the sunlight streaming through the window. Steamer is used to the fact that sometimes someone dresses up, puts on a mask, that there are more and more objects in the studio, that sometimes they paint his wall over and over again. For that, when there is porcelain or Christmas decorations in front of the camera's eye, when Irena makes photographic fushions, he does not even deign to look.
“Tenant” is the story of Steamboat, who lives in the only world he knows: in the successive apartments of Irena, Janek and Gucio and, in parallel, in the realities of ‘What's done is done’, ‘New Athens’, ‘Harvest Festival’ or ‘Slaughter of Innocents’. A cat that loves food and never misses an opportunity to appear in a photo.
Looking at Steamboat's photos, you can see the cat inserted into situations where no one expects it: a feline cuddling up to figures with sinisterly painted faces, a redhead staring completely impassively at a skeleton, a stuffed ram, sleeping under the demonic smile of a clown. For a long time I thought he was a feline John Malkovich, a tenant of Trelkovsky, whose hosts offer him a tailored version of reality.
However, the longer we looked at Steamboat, the more I saw in him not a cat-mascot, but a cat tenant, a person of character and a seasoned photobomber.
Martyna Nowicka
There were other possibilities. There were two cats in the basket that Janek brought from a neighbor, but he was the one who decided to climb into Irena's lap and fall asleep, thus sealing the eternal lease. So for years, where the house, there's the Steamer. And where the house, there - for Irena - the studio. Parówka, in turn, not at all involuntarily, became a tenant of successive realities that Irena called into existence.
A purebred art cat remains a cat: sleeping soundly in the middle of a situation that should immediately turn into a frame, examining strange objects brought home, curling up in a ball in the sunlight streaming through the window. Steamer is used to the fact that sometimes someone dresses up, puts on a mask, that there are more and more objects in the studio, that sometimes they paint his wall over and over again. For that, when there is porcelain or Christmas decorations in front of the camera's eye, when Irena makes photographic fushions, he does not even deign to look.
“Tenant” is the story of Steamboat, who lives in the only world he knows: in the successive apartments of Irena, Janek and Gucio and, in parallel, in the realities of ‘What's done is done’, ‘New Athens’, ‘Harvest Festival’ or ‘Slaughter of Innocents’. A cat that loves food and never misses an opportunity to appear in a photo.
Looking at Steamboat's photos, you can see the cat inserted into situations where no one expects it: a feline cuddling up to figures with sinisterly painted faces, a redhead staring completely impassively at a skeleton, a stuffed ram, sleeping under the demonic smile of a clown. For a long time I thought he was a feline John Malkovich, a tenant of Trelkovsky, whose hosts offer him a tailored version of reality.
However, the longer we looked at Steamboat, the more I saw in him not a cat-mascot, but a cat tenant, a person of character and a seasoned photobomber.
Martyna Nowicka