Jenny Polak is an artist making site specific installation, sculpture, drawings and web projects. Polak comes from England and family histories of hiding and migration are behind her preoccupation with arrival and departure, and illegal assistance of undocumented and stateless people. Her fictional design company, Design For The Alien Within, promotes hypothetical hiding and dwelling places for people without immigration documents. Her furnishings, infrastructural elements, signs, maps and building kits are mutated by the emergencies of today’s immigration and border politics. But these imaginary solutions for immigrant-citizen struggles are presented with a functional aesthetic, and the cheery terms of interior design consumption, tying them to everyday experience.
"Historically,
in wartime, artists are often put to work making camouflage.
In the present time of an undeclared state of war, Jenny Polak's designs parasitical artificial ceilings, double ceilings which function in "real" life as ingenious hiding places. They keep their users, undocumented.. immigrants, purposely invisible, and safe when deportation-thirsty immigration officers arrive. A kind of camouflage for endangered species. I addition to this trouble making practice the artist is showing her ceiling prototypes in art exhibitions. In real world she helps immigrants to hide while through the artworld (and cultural attention) she makes the immigrants enforced invisibility--visible. A good double ceiling. A good double trouble. "
- Krzysztof Wodiczko 2004 commencement address, Maine College of Art