Live Laugh Labour *2025

1. Masking Monsters: SSRI

aluminium, dried flowers, resin, steel, 4X 100 x 65 x 2 cm 

2. Soft Burden, Hard Shell: Bearing weight beyond the body

aluminium, dried fern leaves, resin, fabric, steel, 60 x 45 x 40 cm

Fine Art print, 170 x 95 cm / Photo by Brigita Kasperaitė

Suburbia Contemporary, Leipzig DE

A few years ago, the motivational slogan “Live Laugh Love” (the word order can be changed, if desired) circulated widely in various countries. Interestingly, like other similar slogans, this one also had an effect that was the opposite of its probable intentions: the message was trivialised by repetition, to the point of becoming meaningless. The phrase was used on posters, good luck charms, key rings, and every other imaginable gadget, as a way of encouraging people to enjoy the best that life has to offer. The very fact that the slogan became so well-known makes it legitimate to wonder what motivated people to appropriate it and give it visibility. One might speculate that we feel the need to insistently reify certain concepts when their meaning isn’t realised in reality. 

I believe that Anna Raczyńska’s sarcastic and clever play on words for the exhibition title, Live Laugh Labour, is a relevant response. The “intruder” term, labour, is truly the great presence of our time, so dominant that it diminishes the importance of everything else. Work and the economy frame individuals: they define roles and how we are perceived, they influence how we act and think, they serve as a measure for defining values, and, ultimately, they convince us of the need to remain continually active, according to specific norms, as if this alone were proof of the fact that we are alive. This has always been valid to a certain extent, it’s true, but since modernity, a new characteristic has emerged: the disconnect between our actions and the outcome. 

Labour is hard work that does not reveal its result; we could say it is almost a blind operation. The word, in this sense, fits into Anna Raczyńska’s line of research, which is marked by the dialectical relationship between the biographical and the social, the local and the global, the contingent and history. Through a process of semantic “subversion,” accompanied by the free use of a variety of techniques and materials (combining tradition and new technological possibilities), the artist investigates the problematic nature of some of the recurring symbols and meanings in contemporary society. Unlike the blind approach mentioned above, this is a creative process that combines analytical ability and sensitivity, encouraging the audience to reflect and interpret. This applies to all the works in the current exhibition, which has been conceived as a path of correspondences.

Text: Matteo Innocenti