'Marta Czok - Archiving a Legacy' Jacek Ludwig Scarso When my Mother, Marta Czok, died last February, it happened as a complete shock for all of us. She had always joked, in her witty and no-nonsense approach, that her ideal death would take place while busy in her studio, still at the peak of her creative forces. And that’s exactly what happened. The trauma that resulted from this, for all the admirers of her work and especially for us, her family, is difficult to handle, but mitigated by the legacy she has left us and our desire to project this into the future. As Senior Curator of Fondazione Marta Czok, working in Rome, Venice and from my base here in the UK, there is a need to fight the emotional turmoil of grief with a drive for continuing to establish Marta Czok’s position in contemporary art history. My Mother was an outsider on so many levels: her stateless identity (born in Beirut from a Polish family that found political asylum in London in the aftermath of WW2, then moving to Italy in the 1970s where she established her career); her position as a female artist, in an art market that, in Italy’s 1970s-1990s, was invariably male-dominated; and her artistic approach that fiercely championed figuration in an art world where conceptual and abstract styles were considered more “contemporary”. This outsider position gave energy and irreverence to her canvases. Look carefully: even the most tenuous imagery of domestic life has an intentional sense of subtle instability in the composition: danger is ever-present, implied or explicitly portrayed. Yet all is carved out of an aesthetics of illustration, that appears deliberately naïve, concealing both the painstaking detailing and attentive layering of media (in her latter years, acrylic, graphite and charcoal), as well as the often satirical tones that make her work so distinctive. My Mother looked at the world in a constant fluctuation between optimism and cynicism: social hierarchies, war and the ideology of power are often at the centre of her works, alternated with moments of fleeting joy in the everyday. Her sense of humour, from the mundane to the satirical, is ever-present. That’s how she thought: in visual jokes that mitigated her own tumultuous way of seeing. Shortly after her untimely death, we commissioned a video documenting her studio, exactly how she left it: thousands of colours, paint brushes and art tools; overflowing ashtrays, the ever-present BBC radio, books and papers, and her sketches and notes dispersed everywhere. That was the world of Marta Czok, observing the outside one from her seemingly chaotic studio, where she found her solace – never keen to go out, but surprisingly at ease and rather outlandish in the social occasions that she would attend. This untidy yet endearing world is now the focus of a complex process of archiving. Building an archive is far more than cataloguing each work, although that is in itself no mean feat: it is as much about looking back as it is about looking forward, thinking about the archive as an experimental opportunity to keep rediscovering and recontextualising Marta Czok’s work. In that spirit, we are currently exhibiting a parallel exhibition in Venice, entitled Marta Czok ARCHIVUM VR Edition, in collaboration with Anise Gallery in London and AVR London, exploring a VR journey into Czok’s work. Next, we’ll be working with Università di Urbino and the Imaging for Humanities Laboratory on a new project using the latest technology in 3D modelling to digitise works from our Collection, while contextualising the work alongside the Tangible Archives project at London Metropolitan University. Most importantly, we continue to present her work internationally, with a special emphasis on those places that are of particular significance to her life. This exhibition, with thanks to Henryka Milczanowska, the Foundation for Polish Emigration Art 1939-1989 and the Italian Cultural Institute of Krakow, is a perfect example of this. Beyond technology and archiving efforts, Marta Czok’s work continue to speak, provoke emotion and thought; and, as they do so, she lives on with them.