swimming lessons and universal wishes

Magda Bielesz

shots taken from "swimming lesson" video, no sound, 00:01:34, 2004

Swimming lesson:"I'm fascinated with states which I can not (perhaps as yet) experience. I can’t swim. I fell down in the water when I was the child, so the only way for me to swim is to paint this, and I also made a swimming lesson video. The video is about this feeling: the only way to go to the sea for me is to go like a Jesus over the sea, because I’m afraid of the water. Thanks to this video my dreams come true."

I also made 12 pillows to swim in dreams. The 12 pillows have a special swimming license (in the Communist era, everyone who wanted to swim in a lake or sea needed a special license card called 'Karta pywacka', like a driving license. I took the original swimming license and used it in my project, changing only the name of the person who give the license to my name - the teacher of swimming in a dream.

Universal wish:When I was a child I used to paint everything that I wanted to have. At that time they were child’s wishes, like to be a princess or to have a dog, but now I’m going this way. Mike Kelly said: "Artists are people who are allowed a certain social privilege to act out in ways that adults aren't supposed to act out". And it is great. Thanks to that I feel safer and more sure of myself…

I asked people that I met on my way in the small village of Mooste in Estonia what is their dream, the most important wish in their life, and I made small pictures as a representation of this wish - so that finally every person who I met has got their own wish... their wishes come true.
I want to make a utopian vision of happiness using a paint as material. In my idea I appeal to Jacques Lacan's theory of perception of subjects. I tried to make a reconstruction on canvas, a picture seeing into other person’s mind. The most important aspect of this work is perceiving and the challenge of moving the picture from one mind into another: we can at last see things in a different way. Thinking "a window" or "a plant" we think of different windows and plants. There could be a difference between the dreams I painted and the dreams in their minds, but I took on this risk.
I put polaroid pictures on opposite walls - one on side the owners of the wish, and at the same level on the second wall the painted wish.

Magda also sells some pills with wishes like: meet E.T./ change your life/ tears stopper/always fresh breath/change Your sperm taste - banana, nuts, carrot etc./feel success and happiness/have a best friend/feel beauty/fall in love/connection improver/refreshing smile/be afro/be me/be born again

You can buy them in:KIG, kukus and several other places

And finally there´s the Universal Wish blog (in collaboration with Babel),everybody who feels bad at this moment can write their wish here.

more works by Magda Bielesz