Paulina Olowska’s feminist take on folklore

As often happens during winter, I romanticise my relationship with nature. The musical quality of the wind whistling in my ears feels like some kind of earthly secret is trying to be communicated, and the crunch of frost-bitten leaves narrate my morning walks to the tube. In her debut exhibition for Pace London, ‘Squelchy Garden Mules and Mamunas’, Paulina Olowska reimagines Slavic folklore and mythology. She animates the space with her large-scale paintings, collages, film and sound installation, bringing birdsong and woodland ambience to the white walls of the gallery; the show is a reminder to me of the emotive potential of the natural landscape, and my inseparable connection to it.

‘Squelchy Garden Mules and Mamunas’ takes its title from a video installation that was first featured in Olowska’s 2022 exhibition at the Kistefos Museum, Norway, and focuses on Olowska’s feminist reimagining of the mythological Mamuna. In Polish culture the Mamuna is a female swamp demon – a sinister creature that inhabits shrubbery, small trees, rivers and streams. Olowska reimagines these Mamunas as androgynous nymphs – more spritely and less malevolent than their folkloric counterparts – and places them in northern Europe’s birch and pine forests.

The paintings in the upper galleries are punctuated by a series of video installations encased in intricately carved wooden frames, depicting forest animals, leaves and pine cones. These frames serve as windows to watch Mamunas resting and playing in private woodland hollows. Mokosh and Friends depicts a dark forest clearing guarded by a triad of Mamunas defending their territory. The central figure is grounded by a spear-like branch, lurching forward as if just disturbed from a hunt. The cool brown tones of the forest floor and subtle gleams of light reflecting off the frosty grey branches gives the scene a feeling of dampness from an earlier rainfall or morning dew.

In Rod with Children and Mule we see a hooded figure dressed in white fur cast as a maternal figure standing guard over its fellow Mamunas as they rest on the snow-covered forest floor. Olowska’s scenes have all the tenderness and charm of Where The Wild Things Are, elevated by the rich folklore of her Polish roots.

Throughout the show, Olowska is intent on reimagining female mythological creatures separate to their history. She uses photographs sourced from Polish Vogue and the work of photographers Arthur Elgort and Branislav Šimončík as a starting point for her compositions. Šimončík’s photograph Hidden Signals, where two models pose nestled in a tree, became Olowska’s Dziewannas (After Branislav Šimončík). While Glisne (After Arthur Elgort) shows a landscape that draws on Arthur Elgort’s 1993 photograph Nadja Auermann, Ireland. 

In the downstairs gallery space, a group of mannequins display the costumes worn in Olowska’s Kistefos performance, which mirror the compositions and outfits worn by the Mamunas in the paintings upstairs. These mannequins were inspired by Montaka (Ukrainian knotted guardian dolls) and the Polish ritual Topienie Marzanny (where straw dolls representing death, winter, and disease, are drowned in the river during spring). Bathed in the soft glow of the gallery lighting, they almost come to life, embodying Olowska’s penchant for attributing a living soul and spiritual quality to places, objects, and elements of nature.