Palace of Culture

Palace of Culture is a dream diary, leading the reader into a personal and surreal engagement with the bewildering complexity of contemporary popular culture. Like her previous work Red Roses, Palace is a freewheeling work drawing the reader in to participate in its very construction. The layering of the oneiric on top of popular culture results in an intriguing interweaving of symbolic meanings (the notation and enactment of inner-states of feeling and being) with the arbitrary marketing decisions of our broader cultural stage. The language of Palace of Culture is not only the subject's medium, but a source of revelation itself, a phantasm. It is something that is dreamt by its author and its reader, in the palace, at four a.m. "Ania Walwicz's work has always moved across genres, modes and registers, bringing self-reflexivity and metapoetics as material presences into the scene of the production, staging the subject in process, the subject in progress... Inspired by the great fabulists like Kafka and Dostoevsky [she] reactivates the avantgarde traditions from Stein, Joyce, Schwitters through the multiple lenses of psychoanalysis." -Marion Campbell "More rhythmic and breath-borne than 'prose', more threatening than 'poetry'... this is language as mark, transgressive desire subverting the forces of repression... She has developed new stylistic forms, the elusive relationship between the now and the always which inhabits the mirror and the stage. One recalls Breton's characterization of beauty as convulsive, like the train thrumming in the station without leaving or having left." -Eden Liddelow "Artistic wit Ania Walwicz: playful... and dark." -Jessica Wilkinson