otwarcie wystawy: 31 marca (piątek), g. 19 

Wystawa „Pięć nieczystych zadań” składa się z pięciu niezależnych realizacji artystycznych, które odnoszą się do różnorodnych kontekstów towarzyszącej nam nieustannie obrazowej komunikacji. Autorka i autorzy eksperymentują z mediami, które na co dzień stanowią podstawę naszych kontaktów ze światem (fotografią, filmem, obrazem sieciowym, obrazem generowanym cyfrowo, virtual reality).

 Uczestniczkę i uczestników wystawy łączy coś jeszcze – to osoby zaangażowane w struktury życia akademickiego¹, pracujące w świecie niespójnych kryteriów odnoszących się do własnej pracy artystycznej, roli nauczyciela oraz uczelnianego funkcjonariusza. Taka pozycja, zazwyczaj przyjmowana za oczywistą, rodzi szereg pytań i wątpliwości. Jak wpływa na charakter twórczych poszukiwań?

 Tytuł wystawy nawiązuje do filmu Larsa von Triera „Pięć nieczystych zagrań” (2003), w którym bohater, słynny dokumentalista Jurgen Leth mówi: „jestem obserwatorem, nie uczestnikiem”. Doświadczenie wspomnianych niespójnych kryteriów, w ramach których funkcjonujemy w dzisiejszym społecznym kontekście, czyni rozróżnienie zawarte w deklaracji Letha wartym namysłu. Wydaje się ono dziś niemożliwe do realizacji. Ale czy jest tak na pewno? Jaka jest zatem rola artysty w nasyconej sprzecznościami i nieprzejrzystymi zasadami rzeczywistości? Prezentowane na wystawie realizacje odnoszą się do powyższego pytania, choć żadna z nich nie czyni tego w sposób programowy, a każda proponuje odmienną, niespójną(!) odpowiedź. 

Piotr Wołyński

Olaf Brzeski, Klaudia Figura, Jakub Kosecki, Tomasz Kręcicki, Monika Kwiecień, Jan Możdżyński, Iza Opiełka, Mateusz Piestrak, Cyryl Polaczek, Karol Radziszewski, Anna Rutkowska, Filip Rybkowski, Maks Rzontkowski i Marcin Zonenberg

The Backyard exhibition opens up a story of a seemingly calm, grey, tenement backyard. It presents the works of fourteen artists working in various media, including painting, sculpture, photography and video art. At the exhibition we can recall the memories of playing on a carpet frame / climbing frame, find a lost bicycle, feed pigeons with bread or finish smoking a cigarette. The collected objects resemble various  abandoned, and often forgotten elements, which are randomly located in our backyards. Exhibited like museum artifacts, they take on new meanings and begin to tell their individual stories about the life of small communities.

In addition to echoes of the backyards of childhood, the selection of each work for the exhibition was determined through a tug-of-war between the everyday (of things, phenomena, materials and images) and the unusual and visual character of the work of art.

Tenement backyards are spaces suspended between the private and public spheres. Their visual character, the way they look, results from the eclecticism and randomness of the objects gathered there and the phenomena occurring in those spaces.  They manage to escape the common aestheticisation of the world. The presented works differ from each other aesthetically, but also in terms of the medium used. The empty, white space of the gallery emphasises the aesthetic dimension of each object, and at the same time, complicates the relationship between reality and art, the ordinary and the extraordinary, the backyard and the gallery.

The works presented in the exhibition were created by Polish artists of different generations, who share an interest in everyday life that surrounds us.

Opening: 2 Dec 2022, 4pm
Tour: 2 Dec 2022, 6pm
Finissage: 23 Feb, 5pm

Matthew C. Wilson’s works include films, photographs and installations. Wilson’s 2017 experimental film Geological Evidences sits at the center of his solo exhibition at galeria SKALA in Poznań, PL. Geological Evidences was filmed in near-infrared in and around an archeological excavation site, where the tools of human ancestors were found, within a lignite coal mine. The landscape, dominated by a vast pit, invites reflection about the past and future, and the place of industrial civilisation within entangled, long-term processes, ranging from environmental to social. How will the activities of industrial societies be understood by humans of the future or – for that matter – some other intelligent beings, born perhaps from the marriage of technology and organic lifeforms? Such a question, seeded by the film, is expanded upon in the other works in the exhibition in a spiraling of speculations – as if an outgrowth of contemporary science, some future form of knowing – on processes cascading across scales and between the domains of geology, biology, and technology.

Matthew C. Wilson holds a master’s degree in visual arts from Columbia University in New York and is based in the Netherlands. His films, sculptures and installations bring together a variety of entities – humans linked by natural and historical processes, mercurial materials, plants, animals and micro-organisms, hybrid figures and supra-individual entities. He has shown his work at IFFR International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin and the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, among others. The project at SKALA gallery – curated by Arkadiusz Półtorak, researcher at Jagiellonian University’s Department of Performance Studies – is generously supported by the Mondriaan Fonds.

Matthew C. Wilson, still from Geological Evidences, 4K/UHD near-infrared video with sound, 2017.

“Cezary Poniatowski and Radek Szlaga use entirely different artistic languages, their works are based on disperate syntaxes, their grammar is ruled by unrelated laws. Hence the title of the exhibition, referring to two different artistic dialects, but also to the ambiguity of the word “speaker”, meaning in English not only a person who uses its native language but also a source of sounds.

Poniatowski’s monochrome, sometimes oppressive aesthetics echoes the works of Polish sculptor Henryk Morel (1937-1968). It is filled with post-apocalyptic tension, radiating from the once useful objects covered in artificial leather, knocked out of their original functions, gathered again in mysterious dispositions.

Radek Szlaga is on the other hand exploring the joy of playing with a perfectly mastered medium of peinting, breaking its codes, turning it sometimes towards abstraction, sometimes in the direction of mischievous realism. He teases the illustrative, sweeping tendencies known from post-Tuymans artists, generously scattering motifs, setting traps in viewers, and weaving personal stories.

At the “Native Speakers” exhibition in the Skala gallery, the main theme is sound, its importance in culture, but also the vision of its jamming, cutting off and annihilation. On the one hand, music is an element of the emerging identity – in the 1980s or 1990s, recording rock songs on blank cassettes took the form of an almost mystical ritual and a clear declaration of worldview. Radek Szlaga, brought up on the ideals of the Cold War dream about America, reaches for the soundtracks of his childhood. There is no idealization here, but rather a settlement, intertwined with light nostalgia and humor. Hence “Painting” inscribed in the shape of the famous Metallica logo.

Cezary Poniatowski constructs his works from elements reminiscent of rooms that isolate from sound, often their building material are loudspeakers – deaf, hollow, deprived of their principled function. It is a universe of disinherited objects, sometimes sewn together with a thick seam made of cable ties, glaring at the viewer with the empty eye sockets of binoculars. These artworks evoke anxiety, evidence of lack, persistent absence.

Both these archipelagos are linked by references to music – traces of its presence, but also of its persistent lack. And although it is in vain to look for the sound literally emanating from any of the works, the visual rhythm seems to be quite enough. Another element that connects the artists is their immersion in the world of American culture. Radek Szlaga is inclined to the United States at the time of the end of the Cold War, a land full of resolute hope, imprinted in the entire arsenal of popular entertainment. Cezary Poniatowski also draws from American iconography, but the one focused on social anxieties, exploring the post-apocalyptic themes notoriously repeated in the cinema. It all adds up to an intriguing duet that expresses various phantasms, a kind of nostalgia and a passion.”

Alicja Rekść

Cezary Poniatowski (b. 1987) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw where he received his MFA. He mainly works in the fields of installation, sculpture, site-specific interventions.

His recent solo shows include: Heavy Silence, Fonderia Battaglia, Milan, Italy (2021); Relief, Basilica di San Celso, Milan, Italy (2021); Vaults and Swellings, Contemporary Art Centre FUTURA, Prague, Czech Republic (2021); Welcome to Itchy Truths, Gallery Stereo, Warsaw, Poland (2020); Hearth, Jan Kaps, Cologne, Germany (2020); Hereafter (with Sami Schlichting), Mélange, Cologne, Germany (2019); Sick-box, Gallery Stereo, Warsaw, Poland (2018); Compost, Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland (2017). 

His recent group shows include: Material Fatigue, Museum of Textiles, Łódź, Poland (2022); Native Speakers, galeria SKALA, Poznań, Poland (2022); Man’s Traces in Nature, Wschód, Warsaw, Poland (2022); Phantasmata, Public Gallery, London, United Kingdom (2022); A Glimpse of the Setting Remains, Clima, Milan, Italy (2022); Metabolic Rift, Kraftwerk Berlin, Berlin, Germany (2021); All Worlds Are Flat, Blindside, Melbourne, Australia (2021); The Spirit of Nature and Other Fairy Tales. 20 years of The ING Polish Art Foundation, Silesian Museum, Katowice, Poland (2019); Nosztrómo, Ashes/Ashes, New York, United States (2019); Waiting for Another Coming, Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland (2018); Doors of Paradise, Union Pacific, London, United Kingdom (2018); Friend of a Friend in Berlin, ChertLüdde, Berlin, Germany (2018).

Lives and works in Warsaw.

Radek Szlaga (born 1979) – graduate of the University of Arts in Poznań. The artist’s primary field of work is painting, drawing, sculpture and installation. In his practice, Szlaga undertakes exploratory and experimental activities encompassing the visual culture of Eastern Europe and America, combining these themes with his own experience as a migrant. The key to understanding Szlaga’s work is the exploration of identity and the boundary between reality and simulation. His practice is based on both historical research and the introspective mining of his own memories and dreams. Szlaga describes his painterly approach as a ‘way of thinking’ that implies the constant revision and ‘peeling back’ of successive layers of tradition and history through the selective recycling of found and archival images. This often involves a literal ‘copy/paste’ and transferring fragments from one canvas to another.

Selected solo exhibitions: Kill Your Idols, San Celso, Milan, Italy (2022); Diaspo⟨r⟩a, Postmasters Gallery, Rome, Italy (2021); Mercator, LETO, Warsaw (2021); Places I Had No Intentions, Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, Warsaw (2019); Places I Had No Intentions of Seeing, Museum Jerke, Recklinghausen, Germany (2018); Various Bozies, Mathare Art Gallery, Nairobi, Kenya (2017); Puritan, Pioneer Works, New York, USA (2015).

Selected group exhibitions: The Worlds Within, Spazio Field , Palazzo Brancaccio, Rome, Italy, (2021); Wild at Heart, Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland (2018); The Travellers, KUMU, Tallinn, Estonia (2017); Post-Peace, Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart, Germany (2017); this one is smaller than this one, Postmasters Gallery, New York, USA (2016); State of Life. Polish Contemporary Art Within a Global Circumstance, National Art Museum of China, Beijing, China (2015); Tribute to Errors and Leftovers, Performa 13, New York, USA (2013). 

He lives and works in Brussels.

Alicja Rekść (born 1986) – PhD in Art Studies, critic, sometimes curator; originally from Łódź. Lives and works in Paris.

Art Viewer: Cezary Poniatowski, Radek Szlaga “Native Speakers” at galeria SKALA

“Unhappy the land that needs heroes”
– Bertolt Brecht, The Life of Galileo (1939) sc. 13

In traditional western narratives, the reader is encouraged to identify with a singular protagonist, a hero defined by agency, free will, and psychological depth, who undergoes an evolution and resolves problems as the story progresses from beginning, middle, and end. Our world today can be characterized as one of continuous crisis and uncertainty, from the COVID pandemic to increasing environmental collapse, from war in Ukraine and elsewhere to the ongoing physical and symbolic violence brought about through the intersection of economic, geopolitical, gendered, sexual, and racial injustice. Given this crisis, there is a tendency to look for new heroes who would simply save us from the problems of today. Yet it is precisely this heroic “monomyth”, the idea that all problems are personal and they’re all solvable by a singular, dramatic individual, that has distracted us from the possibility of deeper, broader change or of holding accountable the powerful who create and benefit from the status quo and its myriad forms of harm. The artists in the exhibition Absence of Protagonists contest these simplified conceptions of identity and agency, addressing feelings of disillusionment, confusion, and disharmony to destabilize the fantasies of a singular saviour and its imbrication in the harmful myths of our contemporary era. The systems that we struggle against in the contemporary world, that MUST be struggled against, will not be brought down by a lone hero. Refusing to be seduced by toxic subjectivities and the lure of personality, these artists use a variety of media and formal strategies to make visible and confront the problems of today, and to imagine new narrative forms and ways of living and being in our time of chaos. The very absence of protagonists, antagonists, and simple plots curiously brings the individuals to the forefront, displaying the intricate complexity, mundanity, and subjectivity that make us all who we are.

Wojtek Nika’s fluorescent neon painting Za Garażami depicts the Japanese character Pikachu, the celebrated mascot for the Pokémon entertainment franchise. With its electric powers, Pikachu is a tough, therefore prized, “pocket monster”, but with its small, yellow body, it is also cuddly and cute, serving as an icon for a “friendly” multinational capitalism. This monster is at once property and pal, capital and companion, protagonist and puppet; an avatar, but also an accessory. For the artist, the character recalls the naïve ideals and ethical simplicities of childhood, yet by enlarging and loosely rendering the figure in glowing paint, he emphasizes the toxicity of this form of heroism and artificial friendship, and calls attention to the increasingly virtualized attachments that creep into our daily lives. Pokémon’s inherent logic of acquisition (“gotta catch ‘em all”) is demonstrated as an exaggerated form of desire that comes in tandem with an enchantment of the world and commodities, which seeks to ameliorate a world of detachment and confusion through an image of intimacy and cuteness.

The intimacy of capitalism and the increasing commodification of our identities is made most visible in Laura Radzewicz’s fictional enterprise NYXEM, which parasites the data collection mechanisms of tech corporations and introduces noise into the workings of surveillance capitalism. Tracking our every move, information brokers extract our data and trade our personal lives for profit, exploiting our vulnerabilities, sensitivities, and desires. By co-opting the appearance of advertising with uncanny CGI renders and familiar yet convoluted jargon, Radzewicz’s campaign infects social media streams, merging with the content of targeted ads to introduce a counter-narrative that calls attention to the collection, commodification, and instrumentalization of the dark data of our inner lives and habits.

The propagation of readymade lifestyles and capitalism’s logic of waste and consumption is a core principle in the works of Miłosz Rygiel-Sańko. The artist’s sculptural assemblage exploits the ready-to-assemble standardization of particle board furniture to bring together disparate elements, yielding a “personalized” framework of home-décor whose use is ambiguous yet familiar. As a further nod to the flattening of social relations and the (mis)use of commercial objects, the artist also presents a photographic print that represents the rear side of a flat-screen video monitor overlaid with slices of zucchini with burned dots, as if the monitor had been used as a grill. Parodying the illusion that one can understand technology better by investigating its components and “back end”, the image demonstrates technology as a “black box” whose inner workings are opaque and mysterious and imagines other uses of the detritus of capitalist consumption. 

As a further critique of techno-fetishism and its role in the production of our subjectivities, Jakub Kanna’s Too Fast to Last charts a history of the modernist obsession with speed and technology through the expansion and subsequent failure of car culture. By setting Marinetti’s 1909 Futurist Manifesto in dialogue with Franco Berardi’s 2009 Post-Futurist Manifesto, the artist adds his own speculative manifesto that calls attention to the decay and destruction brought on by cars and their infrastructure. To illustrate this entropic decay, the artist produced a sculpture that contorts the form of a street racing car spoiler into a twisted mobius strip. In a clever reference to the disfigurement of time and space in our contemporary world, the 3D printed object is comprised of an entire kilometre of thermoplastic filament, which is set into contrast with the slow, laborious mechanical manufacture of the object. Thus, the slowing down of speed analysed by Berardi is embodied in the object itself, which the artist uses as a nuanced critique of the “capitalistic race” at the core of our society.

Where many of her cohorts emphasize technology as a space for critique and intervention, Julia Woronowicz instead looks to the rituals of the past as a site for a radical re-envisioning of the self. A video depicts the artist undergoing a pre-Christian ceremony from the Wielkopolska region where her long curly hair is cut to preserve spiritual power and mark her transition into adulthood. Though this tradition recalls the loss essential to any heroic narrative, her video emphasizes the social and communal dimensions of the practice and the continued repression of feminine power. Rather than discard the personal history embodied in the hair and the mystical powers of pagan practices, the artist instead fashioned the locks into an unsettling and abject pair of earrings to wear, suggesting a new female-centric myth out of ancient traditions and the possibility for spiritual power and rejuvenation in the everyday. 

In both Xu Yang and Mari Ferrario’s works, they unsettle the human subject as the primary protagonist in the world by critiquing an inherent bias for anthropocentricism and human exceptionality in narratives, and therefore politics. Xu Yang’s digital collage One person, One zoo tells the story of an old man who runs a zoo by himself to expose the contradictions and possibilities in human and animal relations. As both saviour and imprisoner, the old man wants to help the animals, but is unable to do so effectively. Yet Xu’s fragmented narrative resists the urge to place this character’s story at the centre, instead giving equal importance to the experiences of the non-human subjects, and therefore envisions a more holistic and equitable interaction between species.

Mari Ferrario’s video installation Collaborative Task similarly decentres human subjectivity to confront the border regimes that bring extensive suffering for humans and non-humans alike. In a hypnotic video of found footage and recontextualized statements, the artist invokes rhizomic, mycelial, aquatic, and energetic flows from biological systems and suggests that these forms of connection, collaboration, and interrelation offer a model to resist the increasing division of the world. An accompanying sculptural assemblage further illustrates this principle by charting the possible flows of energy from one terrain to the next, thereby depicting relation as a bio-technical machine that functions through the enabling and arrest of movement in an endless cycle.

Returning to the self as a site for resistance, Julia Walkowiak’s Papierniczy, który towarzyszy mi przez życie. Papiery z ostatniego półrocza uses auto-fiction to emphasize identity as a multifaceted process of continuous becoming and reivsion where memory and fantasy are in constant negotiation. Amidst the clutter of lyrics, reflections, and found quotes, the artist keenly demonstrates Sara Ahmed’s suggestion that “memory is the amnesia you like”. By presenting her personal notes and journal in the public sphere, the artist exposes herself, while also calling attention to the ways we re-write our own experiences through imagination and manipulation. At once casual and radically vulnerable, the fragmented texts encourage identification and empathy while also contesting the image of the artist as a heroic, autonomous, and confident individual. As the artist writes: “I don’t want to feel tough” “I want support from community, I want to feel unity”.

Despite having their education fundamentally interrupted by disease, war, and all the other troubles of the world, the artists in Absence of Protagonists resist the disillusionment, apathy, and passivity that such forces encourage, charting their own means for creative growth and systemic resistance. In the presence of a certain kind of profanation of heroism, we see the everyday quality of the deed, its constant revision, its collective condition, its disruption, its unmonumental apposition. In a time of collective psychosis and confusion, the artists, each in their own ways, reject the desire for a savior and the egoism of the self, instead exploding the concept of the protagonist into a broader spectrum of interconnected relations. By analyzing the systems that threaten our survival and happiness, the artists expose narrative as an expression of power and desire and call for more nuanced and complex stories to tell and retell in our times of crisis.
– Post Brothers

Eternal Engine: Jagoda Wójtowicz i Martix Navrot / Martix Navrot i Jagoda Wójtowicz
„Eternal Engine: Enter The Chamber”

curator: Aleksandra Skowrońska
producer: Aleksandra Kołodziej
galeria SKALA | 14 ̶30.06.2022
The event is presented as part of Short Waves Festival 2022

exhibition opening: 14.06.2022 g. 18:00;
curator’s tour: 16.06.2022, g. 15:00;
gallery opening hours: 14 ̶19.06., g. 12 ̶20;
21 ̶30.06., g. 12 ̶18;
closed 25 ̶26.06.

Eternal Engine: backyard enchantresses and cyberfairies of technoculture.

Eternal Engine: visual artists, designers and software developers incorporating the notions of xeno-, glitch- and cyberfeminism into their practice. 

Eternal Engine: Open Source and Free Learning warriors.

Eternal Engine: Jagoda Wójtowicz and Martix Navrot / Martix Navrot and Jagoda Wójtowicz.

 The first individual exhibition of Eternal Engine is an invitation to replay the past and generate the present. It is an experience of the beginning of the millennium, distorted and shifted: by a millimeter, by an atom, by a pixel. Mystical familiarity and psychedelic everyday. Digital folklore and queer perception.

 The works presented at the exhibition have been selected from the rich artistic output of the collective, which entails video, VR, AR, objects, installations, 3D print, performative and interventional action. In Eternal Engine: Enter the Chamber, the artists free the story of technology from capitalist and patriarchal narrations and use it to produce alternate versions of reality. They generate these realities in collaboration with a collective superhuman mind:  rhizome, fluid, and deeply dreaming AI that escapes unambiguous categorization. 

They state:

Instead of surveillance and control – emancipation and reanimation of exhausted imaginations. Instead of binary oppositions – queering and overcoming cognitive limitations. Everything presented in a DIY environment.

Aleksandra Skowrońska

Vernissage 6.05 at 7:00 p.m.

There will be a performance presented during the vernissage. Performers: Katuma, Anastasia Shergina

Forget-me-nots is an individual exhibition by Olga Krykun, a visual artist born in Odessa and living in Prague. The project is an outcome of the artist’s two-month residence in Poznań. At the exhibition, she presents new paintings, objects and performances that are a continuation of the E-girl Melancholia series, which Olga has been developing since 2021. In the series, the artist paints doll-girls faces in make-up, which express a range of ambiguous emotions: from sadness, through fatigue, to excitement and delight. One of the author’s main source of inspiration, for the E-girl Melancholia, is social media, especially the application TikTok, with its dynamic algorithms and an avalanche of trends. Krykun looks at what emotional reactions and states are caused by the constant scrolling, assimilation of the stream of images and information produced by both application users and companies. At the same time, she juxtaposes them with the figure of the eponymous “e-girl”, pointing to the generational and gender aspects of experiencing the post-digital reality.

At the exhibition in the SKALA gallery, Olga Krykun focuses on the events of recent months: observing and experiencing the war in Ukraine from the perspective of smartphones and social media feeds, which have become an archive of wartime atrocities. For many people, it is the first source of information about military operations, organized aid, experiences and accounts of the victims of the armed invasion of Russia, or the culture and history of Ukraine. Their brutal images of dead bodies and devastated cities and buildings are intertwined with appeals for help and the voices of realpolitik. In a series of new pictures, that among others depict flowers, Olga Krykun shows the feelings, tensions, internal conflicts and desires that arise in the process of digesting this content. These are both sunflowers – symbols of Ukraine, the artist’s motherland, and the title forget-me-nots, which speak of the need to remember the events of the war. In addition to the paintings, the exhibition also presents objects: human-size girl effigies, as well as a performance with the participation of female students – refugees from Kharkiv and Kiev, who from March 2022 have been continuing their studies at the University of Arts in Poznań.

The motifs of flowers and women appear side by side in many songs about war. Songs that often tell of longing, waiting and loss. Forget-me-nots by Olga Krykun could be another such song – expressing as much helplessness and reflection over death as hope for victory and peace.

Olga Krykun’s residency takes place with the support of the Visegrad Fund and the University of Arts in Poznań.

OLGA KRYKUN (born 1994) – visual artist, author of video installations, performances, sculptures and paintings. Graduate of painting and new media at the University of Art, Architecture and Design in Prague. She participated in foreign exchanges at the National Taiwan University of Arts in Taipei, Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts Design in Stockholm and Technological Educational Institute of Athens in Greece. Author of individual exhibitions at the Konstfack Gallery, Stockholm (2019), City Surfer Office, Prague (2018), Dum Panu z Kunstatu, Brno (2018) and Berlinskej Model, Prague (2017). Her works have been presented at numerous group exhibitions and festivals, incl. in Prague, Brno, Kosice, Moscow, Basel and Venice. She was born in Odessa, lives and works in Prague.

The NOBODY IS STANDING, EVERYBODY IS STANDING exhibition presents the process of shaping what is shapeless; of restoring meaning to what is useless; the merging of what is falling apart. In his latest series of works, Krzysztof Mętel looks at the lastingness, disappearance and transformation of matter in relation to the medium of the painting. Using old, discarded or unsuccessful canvases – both his own and those donated by people around him – the artist recomposes them, interfering with their material layer, destroying their existing integrity.

Krzysztof Mętel’s paintings are created as a result of montage. This practice means both the necessity of making a selection of the desired motifs or fragments, and inserting them into a new perspective imposed by the artist, subordinated to his ideas about the final form of the given work. His creative practice is not only about re- and over-painting. It is also about dealing with the matter of old canvases – their unfolding, cutting, touching, straightening, sewing and stretching them onto new stretchers. And so – for example – the work Untitled (3), originally with a rectangular format, gained an oval shape, and the effort in the area of the painting layer was reduced to one strong gesture, albeit one that did not completely obscure the original composition. In another work, for example Untitled (6), the artist’s interest and the intensification of changes were concentrated primarily in the area of painting and colour compositions, and the transformation meant the need to tame the expressive identity of the images used in this work. In Untitled (2), the original anatomical motifs (fragments of arms, legs) were rearranged in such a way that they became merely abstract surfaces of colour, the genesis of which was obliterated in the process of their transformation. Sometimes this struggle arises, however, from humble observation and following the nature and scope of changes suggested by the images themselves – the cut-out fragments adjust to each other intuitively and suggest new systems and connections. 

Krzysztof Mętel’s painting becomes a process of establishing relationships and new hierarchies. In its genesis, it is sometimes transparent – not too tightly stretched, curling at the edges of the canvas, undulating surfaces, folds or provisionally attached corners give clues as to its history and the status of its recycled origin. They also remind us that the painting is a materiality, the mastery of which requires invisible toil and physical effort, undertaken in the quiet of a studio. These elements also suggest that for Krzysztof Mętel, the image is not so much content as a visual fact that crystallises at the intersection of painting elements such as colour, composition and format. The artist understands this type of activity is related to (de)constructing, recontextualising and rebuilding as stabilising the hitherto compositional or material instability of images. The new architecture of these works built by the artist is an attempt to support what, in his opinion, is sliding and moving.

This sense of instability in relation to images brings to mind the aspirations of architects and engineers to master the laws of statics and erect buildings that resist the process of sliding matter. The history of the Edmund Szyc Stadium in Poznań tells us about such a struggle. Built in 1929 for the General National Exhibition, it had to be closed just a few hours after opening due to subsidence of the structure and the instability of the scaffolding supporting the reinforced concrete elements. Attempts to stabilise this building undertaken in subsequent years were unsuccessful, which resulted in the need to partially dismantle the building and rebuild it based on new plans. Currently derelict and unused for years, the stadium is in a phase of decay – both in terms of matter and meaning. Until recently, what made it possible to preserve the remnants of sense of these structures falling into oblivion were the everyday spatial practices of homeless people, living, and thus enlivening, the remains of the adjacent changing room building. Although the Edmund Szyc Stadium in Poznań provokes questions and opens topics far from those to which Krzysztof Mętel devoted his attention in his latest series of works, the history and the present of the building suggest an analogy with the operationalisation of what is dysfunctional. In the case of Krzysztof Mętel’s work, this means stabilising painting. It takes place not so much at the narrative level, but at the level of means specific to painting, such as defining the format, building a composition, stretching canvas on a stretcher. These are exercises in building relationships – though not only intra-image ones.

Małgorzata Anna Jędrzejczyk
Translation: Aleksandra Sokalska-Bennett

Magdalena Radomska
THE ARSENAL OF SYNCHRONOUS COLLECTIVES – MAREK WASILEWSKI’S EXCAVATION AND FORMS OF RESISTANCE

The concept of Marek Wasilewski’s exhibition, Excavation, was created during the modernisation Arsenał Municipal Gallery building in Poznań, which Wasilewski has been director of since 2017. The exhibition consists of four works, three of which – including the titular Excavation – were created as documentation of the discoveries made by the artist during the removal of contents from a modernist building designed in Poznań’s Old Market Square in 1954–1962 by a team of architects – Jan Cieśliński, Zygmunt Lutomski and Regina Pawulanka. Excavation, a seemingly simple work, which consists of a set of photographs taken by Wasilewski in an empty building, is readable through the prism of institutional archaeology, as well as its history and what can be called the archaeology of the gaze.

Wasilewski’s exhibition at the SKALA gallery in Poznań is interesting as an artistic commentary on the insufficiently developed problem of the branch offices of the Central Bureau of Artistic Exhibitions, which functioned from the beginning of the 1950s. The Central Bureau of Artistic Exhibitions was an institution established by the Ministry of Culture and Art at the request of the Association of Polish Artists and Designers (APAD) in order to promote contemporary artistic works and state supervision over contemporary art and artistic life in the Polish People’s Republic. This included the roots of the still-functioning network of Polish institutions of contemporary art. Excavation, Exhibits and Plein-airs reach for material traces and artefacts of the history of the institution, but also the history of the building itself as a material carrier of social, economic and gender relations.

Among the series of photographs that make up Excavation, there are those that document the material synchronicity of the various stages of the Gallery’s functioning, reducing them to – literally – a common wall surface which bears the traces of several interior renovations by revealing fragments of the unpainted wall – hidden by the objects which were there at that time. Wasilewski does not succumb to the temptation to reduce the frame of the image he photographed to the smooth surface of the wall, and thus – a complex, material message. Nor does he reduce it to a distilled and comfortable form, cleared of rubbish and debris lying on the floor, disrupting the potential, simplified message, according to which even the tedious cleaning of the Gallery of artistic objects would not allow it to reveal itself as anything other than an art space – due to the visual tension of the painted wall and the tradition of the modernist image. Such a procedure would only succumb to the oppressive tradition of formal analysis, falling into its traps of elitism, dependence on institutions, hierarchy, etc. It would be like the striptease described by Roland Barthes, where nudity never comes to the fore, but an act that functions as the last of the costumes to be stripped off¹.

Wasilewski operates – literally and figuratively – with a wider frame, in a way that allows a material analysis to speak, taking into account labour relations, hierarchy, the economic conditions of the functioning of institutions, but also – by exposing the usually invisible work of workers, whose task is to constantly reconstruct the white cube as a distilled space – it is cleansed not only from body and context (as O’Doherty claims)², but also from social, economic and labour relations. In the work of Marek Wasilewski, they are visible in the form of savings during renovations, but also in the inviolability of the interior fittings, which, after all, reflect the working relations, hierarchy, etc. prevailing in it, which appear as existing.

It is worth mentioning that when the space of the then branch office of the Central Bureau of Artistic Exhibitions was put into use in 1962, the famous text of the Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman, On the Characteristics of Total Institutions, was already in circulation. This was the text in which Goffman formulated the famous theory of a “total institution”³, a starting point for institutional archaeology. Although the text referred to institutions of aid, seclusion, protection, or organised work – such as orphanages, hospitals, monasteries, prisons, boarding schools and labour camps – it seems that his framework can be successfully applied to institutions that structured the then artistic life of the branch offices of the Central Bureau of Artistic Exhibitions, which constituted the ersatz of the workplace, but also which were burdened – as Piotr Piotrowski wrote – by a strong attachment to the modernist image, resulting in a reluctance to accept critical perspectives⁴. Thus, contrary to their destiny as meeting places for artists associated in trade unions, they also functioned as places of seclusion, where the elite longings for the model museum-temple could be realised⁵.

The photographs in Excavation also subtly evoke the models of institutional criticism functioning in Polish art, such as Edward Krasiński’s project at the Foksal Gallery in Warsaw entitled Winter Assemblage, which was critical of the institution of the gallery and in which Krasiński laid a cable out of the Gallery, the end of which had to be found by visitors to the Gallery, outside its walls. In Wasilewski’s work, it is a blue hose, a tool not of the artist, but of the workers renovating the Gallery. The artist does not appropriate it as a tool of his work, he does not pick it up, he leaves it – just like the geometric stains of paint on the wall – in the hands of the workers. He does not overly process the photography, he does not care about isolating the motive and showing it in its material, non-formal form.

The black fragment of the wall appearing in the photographs is given a similar status; it becomes a pretext for problematising the educational dimension of art – recalling the works of Jarosław Kozłowski or Joseph Beuys through the launch of the archaeology of gaze, and its revolutionary aspect – by referring to the works of Malevich. However, it retains its material dimension. The white wall of the Gallery shows the work of the workers rather than hides it. Wasilewski’s photographs document the moment when the work of the labourers in the Gallery does not become a customary figure of alienation. It is not undertaken in order to restore the white cube and thus maintain its own invisibility in this institutional system – semantic and visual. On the contrary – it is about excavation – gouging, dirtying, making holes.

This is reminiscent of the work of the Hungarian artist Tamas Szentjóby, who, while preparing his own retrospective at the Ludwig Museum in Budapest, opposed the renovation of the exhibition space after the previous exhibition and displayed his works against dirty, leaky walls, which meant that they were juxtaposed with the work of the Museum workers. Wasilewski’s photographs depicting shoe prints on the floor are a kind of contemporary realism in the genre of Caillebotte’s The floor scrapers – not only do they not favour the trace left by the artist over the traces of workers, but they make them indistinguishable.

It should be added here that the work of Wasilewski the artist, is framed in a way that gives it credibility by the work of Wasilewski the director. The programme of the Arsenal Gallery, co-run by Zofia nierodzińska, is very far from the paradigmatic nature of formal analysis. It takes into account various forms of art and activism, does not favour art as a privileged form of work, does not point to it as the domain of artists and does not isolate it from the political and social, economic or gender context. Finally, it does not create favourable conditions for the alienation of artistic work.

Shortly after Marek Wasilewski assumed the position of director of the Gallery in 2017, his exhibition Excavation seemed to contradict his organisation of: “cleaning the Arsenal, chasing away evil spirits and airing the Gallery”, which was to constitute a symbolic turning point in its functioning according to the rules imposed by its previous director – Piotr Bernatowicz, who had displayed portraits of the Cursed Soldiers on the facade of the building. Although Wasilewski’s aim to attempt a clear break from the right-wing, pro-nationalist narrative of the Gallery under Bernatowicz, it was also a controversial subject in terms of labour rights of the part of Bernatowicz’s support team, who refused to get involved in it. Excavation is a movement in the opposite direction – although it arose during the process of cleaning the Gallery, its author is interested not in the diachronic progress, but in the materialised synchronicity of the Gallery’s history. Wasilewski’s work Happiness was similar in this respect; it was created the same year the financial crisis broke, reinterpreted 1989 and the systemic transformation as an apparently linear process – identical to the process of progress, capitalisation and privatisation from the perspective of the economic crisis and the crisis of capitalism.

Wasilewski’s work shown at the exhibition also dealt with the concept of the collective, as perceived by Bruno Latour in a text whose title echoes the Excavation exhibition – We have never been modern. Latour uses the concept of the collective and “describes humans and nonhumans”, and points to the fact that the term “society” is only a part of it⁶. It is visible in the artist’s photographs showing the contact between the wall and the floor in the renovated gallery, which – due to their format and structure of division – remain in tension with the Polish flag. Here its lower portion materialises not only as an object – part of the floor, but fragments of mould, dirt and other non-human collectives. Wasilewski not only departs from the concept of the nation towards the concept of a social collective; he also shows the authenticity of nature and culture, as does the Estonian artist Tanel Rander’s Decolonise This (2012), which presents a Friedrichian wanderer against the background of the Estonian landscape (divided similarly to the Estonian flag).
This artistic direction is again consistent with the activities of Marek Wasilewski as director – it is worth mentioning here, for example, Monika Bakke’s excellent Refugia: The Survival of Urban Transspecies Communities project at the Arsenal Gallery. Bakke’s project was crowned with an exhibition and a series of events indicating that the Arsenal Gallery cares about its location not only in the political, social and economic context, but also in the context of the biodiversity of the environment in which it consciously functions.

Wasilewski’s exhibition at SKALA is therefore an archaeology, the subject of interest of which is collectives understood in different ways. Although the photographs also show the actual “Excavation” intended to reveal the structure of the building during restoration works, and the fact that the Gallery’s modernist building was built on the existing foundations of historical buildings, Wasilewski is mainly interested in collectives of things not catalogued and merging into the fabric of the building. These are inconspicuous catalogues displayed in the exhibition in conventional display cases as Exhibits, and the slides depicting Plein-airs taken out from the backs of drawers (presumably by members of the Association of Polish Artists and Designers).
The juxtaposition of these two works in the exhibition space is particularly clear – it escapes the dualisms of people and their works, the open air and the exhibition space, and creates a completely different field of tension. Contrasted in such a way, the works problematise the matter of this gallery as an arsenal of human and non-human collectives and provoke the question of collective and trade union aspect of artistic life, or the state structures of its functioning (Plein-airs). But they also demand answers about the oppressiveness of the concept of modernity and its paradigmatic constructs (Exhibits), written about by, for example, Latour and Walter Mignolo⁷.

The Plein-airs, however, also introduce lost materiality into the exhibition space: items from communist times, such as clothes and busses. They make it possible to situate the notions of new materialism, which influence Wasilewski’s works, in the context of historical materialism and socialist reality. A good example of this is the slide showing a bus used during the plein-airs, not only a kind of artefact but also – similarly to the works of Krzysztof Wodiczko and Movement Academy from the 1970s (Vehicle from 1973 and Bus 2 from 1975) – a vehicle of historical materialism and modernity, moving along the axis of progress and towards the future. The use of the conventional method of displaying Exhibits in showcases is synonymous with the gesture of musealising the narrative of modernism.

Wasilewski is interested not in modernist landscapes, but in social landscapes and the hybrid nature of the notion of plein-air, which remains outside the gallery space, but which at the same time functions in the context of the constructed, oppressive and ossified narrative of modernist landscapes and, more broadly, images. The showcases display catalogues of various recognised artists – Kantor, Kobro, Hasior, Nowosielski and Szapocznikow, who in this configuration both succumb to and resist the oppressive narrative of modernity, but not in a conventional way practiced during the formal analysis of specific works and artists, but as collectives of subjects. Squeezed under the wardrobe or behind it, or even overlooked – these material objects (similarly to unpainted wall fragments once hidden behind furniture) are figures of resistance⁸. They are material artefacts which, while unclassified, allow for the synchronous coexistence of contemporary and ancient forms of collectivism and collectives.

Wasilewski’s exhibition topicalises the issues of the APAD-ian identity of the Poznań branch office of the Central Bureau of Artistic Exhibitions at an important historical moment – in which an extreme-right vision of culture is being forced in Poland. Just a few months ago, artists, curators and art historians were united in protest against appointing a conservative, locally known painter Janusz Janowski as the director of the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw. Janowski is associated with the Association of Polish Artists and Designers community and has no experience in running a cultural institution. The appointment happened with the approval of the Association’s committee members but without the participation of trade union representatives at the Zachęta Gallery. These events, similarly to Wasilewski’s exhibition, provoked discussions about trade union aspects of artistic life.

The books displayed in showcases also problematise the concept of the collective in a different way. Covered with non-human life forms, often materially interacting with the works reproduced in them, they are figures of resistance against formal analysis, which is paradigmatic for the institution of modernity. With a peculiar wink to the viewer, the album Brigitte Bardot – Animal Friend from 1976, which is among these figures, provides the exhibition with the context of feminist materialism (for example Donna Haraway’s considerations), but also allows the Gallery’s history to be accounted for in terms of gender equality. Here again it is worth referring to Wasilewski’s policy when running the Gallery. Not only does he respect gender equality in terms of the Gallery’s employees, but also supports projects such as the workshops of the Barcelona-based Gyne Punk collective, who work on issues of corporeality and women’s rights to choose in the context of fertility and motherhood, which are particularly relevant to the current political situation in Poland.

The exhibition culminates in Wasilewski’s work, Earthquake, a set of photographs taken at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, showing cracks in the white walls of the Museum, caused by an earthquake. Another work by Wasilewski, Stones, shown in 2015 at the Kronika Centre for Contemporary Art in Bytom, is also worth mentioning. It took the form of a multi-channel video installation, and featured stones appearing in various places of worship, including Fatima, Jerusalem and Istanbul, and their interaction with pilgrims. However, what draws the viewer’s attention in Wasilewski’s work is the cracking on the stone’s surfaces, similar to that documented by the artist in Zagreb. There is no doubt that it is about unsealing hegemonic narratives concerning either objects of worship or exhibition institutions – but both works also use the notions of nature and culture in a non-dichotomous way, pointing to cracks in their material carrier. In this sense, they are also points of resistance, which arise where matter appears to yield to the forces acting on it.

Earthquake also creates a new interpretive context for Excavation by means of the lines of cracks on the wall of the Zagreb museum and the hose on the floor of the renovated Arsenal Gallery, which have similar functions. These hoses are also a kind of crack in which materialises that which Wasilewski did not manage to appropriate: non-artistic tools of work, which function as forms of resistance to institutionalised space.

Magdalena Radomska
Translation: Aleksandra Sokalska-Bennett

¹ R. Barthes, Mitologie, Warszawa 2000, p. 186.
² B. O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube, The Ideology of the Gallery Space, San Francisco 1999, p.76.
³ E. Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates, new York 1961, pp. 4-12.
⁴ P. Piotrowski, Awangarda w cieniu Jałty. Sztuka Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej 1945-89, Poznań 2005, pp. 185–186.
⁵ D. Cameron, The Museum, a Temple or the. Forum?, “Curator”, vol. 14/1, 1971, pp. 11–24.
⁶ B. Latour, Nigdy nie byliśmy nowocześni, Warszawa 2011, p. 14.
⁷ Cf. Ibidem, p. 17; In. Mignolo, Epistemiczne nieposłuszeństwo i dekolonialna opcja: Manifest, “Konteksty” 2020, no. 4, pp. 15–30.
⁸ This category is discussed in more detail in the book: April M. Beisaw and James G. Gibb [eds.], The Archaeology of Institutional Life, Alabama 2009, pp. 24–25.

Accompanying events calendar:

31.12.21 Friday 2pm |CURATOR’S TOUR | Jakub Bąk
14.01.22 Friday 7pm | CURATOR’S TOUR | Jakub Bąk
31.01.22 Monday 7pm | ARTIST IN CONVERSATION | Holmerem Feldmannem
11.02.22 Friday 7pm | CURATOR’S TOUR | Jakub Bąk
28.01.22 Monday 7pm |finissage| ARTISTS IN CONVERSATION | Holmer Feldmann & Andreas Grahl

What was the art of the 20th and 21st centuries like? Which names and works of art have survived? Will it still be possible in the future to identify dreams and fears, emotions and ideas, desires and passions of our epoch?

Ramon Haze is a detective and art collector living in the future. He commissions Holmer Feldmann and Andreas Grahl to obtain, preserve and catalogue artefacts regarded as being among the greatest works of art left behind by our civilisation. The collection comprises works by such artists as Marcel Duchamp, Jeff Koons, Andreas Bader, Ilja Kabakov, Daniel Burren, Charlotte von Schmerder-Kutzschmann, Ruth Tauer, Piero Manzoni, Josef Scharlamann, Jonald Dudd, Franz Erhard Walther, Constantin Brâncusi, or the completely forgotten Edward Baranov-Knepp.

The works collected on behalf of the fictitious collector were first put on show in the cellars of the abandoned Leipzig factory where Holmer Feldmann and Andreas Grahl lived in the mid 90s of the 20th century. The moment the “East” ceased to exist almost its entire spiritual and cultural heritage ended up in the dustbin of history. Objects deprived both of their function and symbolic sense in the eyes of Ramon Haze became a reservoir of aura, as well as of alleged value, symbolic and material alike. The pair of artists have used abandoned objects to develop a postapocalyptic narrative in the form of a private art collection. The fantasy installation which from the aesthetic point of view is in no way inferior to the most valuable museum collections is also a form of ironic criticism.

Categories that describe works of art produced by society facing downfall, such as arbitrariness, discursiveness and materiality, need to be supplemented with those of exhaustion, pure potentiality or fortuity. During the period of 20 years since the first exhibition, when the world said farewell to history and seemed to be steadily moving towards universal success the collection and the idea behind it became topical again. The threat of catastrophy has returned, this time of total catastrophy. The pessimistic climate of our times and increasingly serious overlapping crises make the vision which materialised in Ramon Haze’s study particularly attractive today.

This exhibition has been organised as part of the programme run by the Foundation for Polish-German Cooperation and by supporting institutions: Poznan Municipal Authority, and Wielkopolska Regional Administration.

The arrangement of the exhibition was possible in collaboration with The National Museum in Poznań. We would like to thank all people and institutions for their help in organizing the exhibition.