Forest, fallen trees, family keepsakes, memories of bonfires lit in the mountain pastures (bonfires ignited with flair, to impress the boys from the neighboring hill and also—at least from the perspective of some—to win the favor of the local girls)… A tour of Bogusław Bachorczyk’s exhibition could begin with such a list. But there are other ways. An equally fitting introduction might be a list of artists whose work enters into dialogue with the pieces gathered in the gallery: Brâncuși, Hasior, Spoerri, Haring… The exhibition is deliberately suspended between the aesthetics of the neo-avant-garde and those closer to folk art, even rural craftsmanship. Yet Bachorczyk’s works refuse to settle fully into any of these orders, evoking a sense of estrangement within each context. This suspended state is metaphorically signaled by the exhibition’s foreign-language title—“Vlach,” the Czech, Slovak, or Serbo-Croatian equivalent of the Polish Wołoch. In contemporary Slavic languages, the word refers to a traveler from the pastoral peoples who once lived exclusively in the southern Carpathians and began colonizing the northern range in the 14th century. Crucially, in the context of the exhibition, the word “Vlach” once simply meant stranger.
The exhibition documents Bachorczyk’s journey back to his roots, namely the Stryszawa region in the Żywiec-Orawa Beskids, where traces of Vlach settlement date as far back as the 15th century. In his works, the artist references the Vlach heritage in various ways—including traditional woodwork techniques and spatial arrangements inspired by patterns of Vlach settlement, still visible today in the Beskid landscape. However, the exhibition title should be read primarily as a metaphor—a figure of the artist’s personal experience as someone returning to a once-familiar land as both insider and outsider, half-foreign. After finishing primary school and moving away from Stryszawa, Bachorczyk gradually distanced himself from aspects of rural identity that conflicted with his identity as a gay man, and later as a student and teacher at art schools—such as the cult of physical labor and devotion to the Catholic Church. Over time, however, not only did the artist’s identity shift, but Stryszawa itself changed. The most striking evidence of the cultural and social transformation of this mountain village are the rescued pieces of furniture—whole and fragmented—which became the material for the works shown at Shefter Gallery. These objects fell out of use during a period of rapid modernization.
