“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.

Opening: Tuesday, October 26, 7 pm
Artist tour: Monday, November 15, 5 pm

In an unimaginably distant time (about 14 billion years ago), in an unimaginably short time, from a singularity of a completely incomprehensible nature, concentrated in a small point of infinite density and temperature, emerged all the elements necessary to form our universe – along with its energy, time and space. What came before – we do not know. Almost all our knowledge of the laws governing the cosmos is helpless against the period between 0 and 10−43 fraction of a second after the Big Bang.

The exhibition entitled THE THIRD FAILEDATTEMPT TO CREATE THE WORLD is yet another attempt to find a visual form for the imagination about the beginning of the Cosmos. The sculpture, consisting of dozens of glass spheres of various sizes displayed on a structure resembling a storage rack, contains a trace of an error, which lies at the core of the exhibition’s concept. The cracks on the white, shiny, flawless surfaces were not an intentional artistic gesture but a result of thefragility of the glass and physical forces acting on it. The meticulously designed architecture of the sculptural object was complemented by uncontrolled events, occurring violently and incidentally, at the liminal moment of the transition of matter from one state to another. The confrontation of scientific speculation on the origins of the cosmos and the private cosmology created for the exhibition is similarly turbulent. It reveals the paradoxical state of the knowledge available to us: it penetrates space and the structures of matter ever more thoroughly, but remains helpless in the face of what happened before the 10−43 fraction of a second of the world’s existence.

—

Agata Michowska (born 1964) graduated in sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań. She runs the Video and Transmedia Narration studio at the Faculty of Media Art of the Art Academy in Szczecin and the Sculpture Studio at Collegium da Vinci in Poznań.

Over the years, her art has evolved from spatial realizations both ascetic and raw in form, devoid of any references to the outside world, to photography, video and sound that are a record of personal reflections on the elementary laws of life and death, creation and decay, passing and memory, affirmation and fear. The images and sounds, often supplemented with literary narration, bring us to the “point” where, according to the universal principle, everything dies and everything is reborn. 

As she notes on her art: “My thinking (…) has been shaped by my experiences with sculpture, which from the beginning I understood not as an object but as the movement of a certain idea in time and space. (…) What is important for me is not its materialization and arrest, but its transformation, constant movement, fluidity and changeability. It shares a similarity with the condition of the human, who is condemned to constant physical and spiritual transformation. This concept of sculpture seems to me close to the essence of film, which is an ideal combination of space, time and form, subject to their action.”

ON PIOTR MACHA’S EXHIBITIONJESUS WAS BORN 6-4 YEARS BEFORE CHRIST

Piotr Macha’s exhibition Jesus Was Born 6-4 Years Before Christ can be seen from different points of view and dimensions in which we operate today. He conveys a multifaceted message; one which is open to complex and intersecting areas of visual culture. Macha can sense the gaps and overlaps –not only in the sense of the breakdown of classical linearity or in the way of conveying the content, but also in the sense of the interpenetration of physical and virtual dimensions, their mutual “haunting”. The title of the exhibition Jesus Was Born 6-4 Years Before Christ signals its contradictory and non-obvious character. Moreover, it is full of ghosts: Mark Fisher is undoubtedly one of the main ones, whose theory is referred to in several places; Jackie Kennedy is another ghost; as is the virtual apparition of Sam Fisher, and so too perhaps the most enigmatic but nonetheless emblematic spirit of Maria Rekowska, whose drawings were found by the artist at the flea market (in the Old Slaughterhouse in Poznań) and are also part of the exhibition.

 Rekowska draws with a pencil from memory, from imagination and from nature. Regardless of the source, these works are quite similar in terms of form and theme –with the exception of one that is  quite abstract and which depicts what could be a plough, an axe or a hook-ended snake, coming out of a pair of trousers. Macha juxtaposes these drawings with his own works, and by using felt-tip pens or Donald Duck bubble gum comics, he evokes nostalgia in the visitors who grew up in the 90s. The artist creates strange, clunky collages that do not hide their component parts from us; we can imagine them broken down into prime factors, element by element; a few drawings, a piece of carbon paper, abstract scraps. They rely and are based, in a nonchalant way, on the recipient’s memory (and their participation in collective memory), their tart sense of humour and the ability to combine incompatible forms into coherent messages. Macha’s collages are a bitter and far-sighted reflection with abjection as the leitmotif. A CD – which is a reference to the cover of Kanye West’s album with the title Yezuus,(and so, significant in this context) – primarily reminds us of the fragile structure of modern memory carriers. Regardless of West’s megalomaniacal tendencies, his legacy, and more broadly, a large part of contemporary cultural heritage is written in the medium and on carriers that are not permanent. CDs, tapes, and disks, even if undamaged, are possibly indecipherable; inhabited by ghosts of data that we do not have, or will soon not have, access to. They work in harmony with Rekowska’s memory, but also reflect on the archaeology of technology, the constant progress of which makes it impossible to access their content, without removing their form. They semi-last and condemn us to refer to our own memory in the end. Tire graveyard (Macha), a cross (!) (Rekowska) are studies not so much from nature, as the latter indicates, but of nature itself –and despite the different times in which they were created (Rekowska’s drawings come from 1940), they are a record of distortions and perspectives, which, apart from the rigid framework, becomes more and more unnatural.

Macha also questions the issues of memory and historical perspective in his loop video showing Jackie Kennedy in a costume, which remains stained to this day and functions in our imagination as one of the most legendary garments in history, and which is stored in a specially constructed, acid-free box in air-conditioned National Archives ( College Park, Maryland). At Caroline Kennedy’s request, it is to remain there until at least 2103. The costume is also perfectly preserved in collective memory; we have seen it in documentary photos, and its reproductions in dozens of films, music videos and comics –all these images are superimposed on each other, are blurred and boiled down to certain generalities; limousine, pink suit, blood and woman on the hood of the car. In Macha’s video, we see pink, blood and Jackie stained with it, though we know it is not her blood, but the blood of President JFK –a belief that stays with us even later, when Jackie is lying, covered in blood and dead on the ground, with a close-up on the gunshot wound to the head. When Macha used to play JFK Reloaded, in which the player has to kill JFK, he always wanted to hit Jackie –  he finally succeeds at the exhibition. But at the same time, Macha allows her to be resurrected.

In the spirit of the same omnipotence, he places Sam Fisher, the fictional hero of the Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell series of books and computer games, alongside the writer Mark Fisher; their silhouettes are printed on transparent foil, which acts as a curtain. He sets both characters against each other, in a mirror image: we have to stand on opposite sides of the curtain to read the biographies of both. When reading about Sam, we see Jackie waving at us in the background. When reading about Mark, we can see baseball caps, worn by the artist, hung at equal spaces, which are separated by a casual message sewn with red thread:YOU – HAVE – NO – IDEA. YOU is immersed in a toilet, whose movable flap reveals its contents to us again and again. Looking inside the toilet is reminiscent of Hitchcock’s toilet from his Psycho. Macha shares Hitchcock’s love of the abomination that Žižek writes about inLacrimae rerum– while Hitchcock, however, was censored and was not allowed to reveal the inside of the toilet bowl and its bloody secret, Macha allows the toilet to whisper to us about the ideas gone down the toilet, not hesitating to mention who will sink with them.

Fisher analyses the departure from the modernist challenge of innovating cultural forms in a way that is adequate to contemporary experience in his book Ghosts of My Life, which accurately portrays all our ills, fears and intuitions. Macha places its title between two skeletons on a canvas, which he places against the wall. Fisher writes about the end of time and the lack of a future, about the constant movement that brings us nowhere; Macha’s toilet opens and closes, Jackie gets cleaned up, and despite the fatal shot, she continues to greet us. The lack of a future is understood here not only as the non-alternative nature of neoliberal capitalism in which we operate, but above all as the effects of its impact on culture over the last 30 years. Fisher describes the stagnation of culture, which refreshes past eras, mixes decades and is based on clichés of collective imaginations. The twenty-first century, on the other hand, continues to calcify, constantly satisfying the audience with a correctly prepared dose and combination of nostalgic clichés that soothe the hardly perceptible longing for something that was good, but also what we simply knew. However, as Fisher writes, it is difficult to imagine what such a set of “clichés” and consensus ideas could be like.

Over the last 30 years, the dominant (in the West) model of toilets has changed, which in the context of the discussed exhibition and considerations by Fisher turns out to be significant. In her famous analysis of the lavatories in the novel Fear of flying, Erica Jong describes different toilets: the French model (the contents of which disappear immediately after flushing), the German model (whose contents can be inspected) and the American model (which is a fusion of the previously mentioned models); the content floats but is “elusive”. Today, German toilets have basically fallen out of use, and the cultural circle broadly referred to as the “West” is usually divided by one model of the toilet – the French-American one, which swallows the contents. And this is perhaps the only area of modern Western functioning that is under-recorded, making it essentially a phantom.

The huge PlayStation logo is also a phantom and resembles a monument topped with spikes protecting against birds. It is immersed in twilight, illuminated in a similar way that city lights illuminate their topography; partially, nonchalantly, inaccurately, randomly. This creates an atmosphere reminiscent of a mixture of Blade Runnerand the Matrix, but also any square in any city that is full of invisible monuments, stone ghosts, nameless and great.

Macha’s neon lights bring to mind an encrypted message; two of them are visual equivalents of the words taketeand maluma, abstract symbols used in an experiment conducted in 1929 by Wolfgang Köhler, in which the subjects were to match the appropriate visual representation to the verbalised words. Most of the participants, regardless of their background, assigned the round-sounding word malumato a rounded shape, and the word taketeto an angular shape. The dual nature of a word is already contained in the form of its visual representation and the corresponding sound, which differ due to the multitude of languages and alphabets. The research suggests that as a species we share this perception of abstract form, at least in the most extreme examples. Mallarme observes that the way words sound do not necessarily correspond to their meaning; annoyingly, for example, joursounds dark, nuit–light[1]. He assigns poetry the task of creating a bond between them and refers to the ancient etymology of words, where these relations were alive. In a similar manner, Macha assigns yellow to the curved form, and blue to the angular one, which is also consistent with the common and intuitive ascribing of colours to shapes. Macha is less concerned with language, but rather negotiates the use of the medium itself –that is, neon and its functions.

Another neon sign, this time a gallows knot (Fisher died by suicide by hanging in January 2017) is also a Eureka! comic book light bulb. It is, however, not about light; Neon signs do not fulfil their pragmatic or luxurious function in the form of advertisements and signs on city streets, nor do they function as a traditionally catchy exhibition facility, but are instead a critical commentary on these functions. Red paving stones may refer directly to the place of neon in the city topography and they bring to mind problems of urbanisation such as gentrification or evictions. In the context of the art gallery, however, cherishing neon in the same way in which it did so light boxes until recently (because they always “work”), the form of Macha’s neon lights is almost irritating. They are not a catchy text, they demand substantive support from the visitor, they are demanding of the visitor. Time and mental space for intellectual effort to learn about “novelties” are a “commodity” that is missing, and the intensity and precariousness of functioning in late capitalism results in overstimulation and exhaustion, which obviously leaves its mark not only on the recipients of culture, but also on its creators. The problem, therefore, does not exist in experiencing the 21st century itself, but rather in the lack of time to experience it, as Macha reminds us of by placing an inconspicuous wristwatch on the wall, which his partner at that time set for 4.20 and left by his bed; for the duration of the exhibition this alarm goes off in the gallery at 4.20 am. In addition to the time and connotation close to marijuana consumers, the form of the watch itself brings to mind the English verb ‘watch’, which also refers to keeping watch and waking. Fisher writes about a society that cannot cope with history and, over time, longs for form. Perhaps the only forms we are faced with are those created by the needs born of capitalism, such as backpacks/containers delivering food from restaurants for the lowest hourly wage, which are most often immigrants from geographically distant countries, providing cheap labour. Uber Eats bags are an instantly recognisable form, regardless of whether they contain their logo or the inscription Only Sleep. This work, however, is far from the already cliché ready-made; it doesn’t so much capture a visual artefact of contemporary culture (the proverbial Cambell’s soup), but rather is characterised by postcolonial self-awareness. The Only Sleepslogan is, as it were, an admission of guilt – the question remains, what to do with such a feeling of guilt. Macha is a keen observer of the structures we are entangled in within the dominant system. His work does not allow us to forget about the place we occupy in these structures. It is also not a simple and unambiguous critique of specific phenomena or sensationalist visual journalism. If Macha pursues current socio-political events, he inscribes them into a broader discourse; in a sense he gloats over another bleak vision that has been fulfilled: a motif that has already appeared in his work as a phantom, which now becomes a fact. In this way, Macha does not so much summon ghosts, on the contrary, he foretells the phantoms and visions that will haunt the ages and dimensions to come; which we fear whilst also letting them come true.

Ewa Kubiak
When writing the text, I used Mark Fisher’s book “Ghosts of My Life”.

[1]Artur Sandauer, “Samobójstwo Mitrydadesa”[Trans. Mithridates’suicide]

Translation: Aleksandra Sokalska-Bennett

Piotr Macha  (born 1982) – a graduate of painting at the University of the Arts in Poznań, where he currently works. In his practice, he combines various media and forms of articulation – from drawing, through curatorial practices, poetry, analogue film, to sound installations. His works have been presented, among others, by theZachęta – National Gallery of Art,Kunstquartier Bethanien Berlin, and the Wrocław Contemporary Museum.

The spacetime, to which Anna Bąk invites us, resembles a phantasmal house; an abandoned house, already freed from the human bustle, repairs, cleaning, and the incessant replacement of worn-out objects with new ones. The objects that fill it bear traces of their former functions. The human mind, addicted to classifying and taming unfamiliar forms, even though it knows they are works of art, recognizes here something like a lamp, a toy, the remains of a curtain, furniture… The quiet murmur filling the gallery may bring to mind the humming of a fan or other household appliances. Of course, everything is off here and it is immediately clear that it is an illusion created by art.

But what is illusion and what is reality?

The first attempts to understand the function of objects belong to the consensus reality. According to Arnold Mindell, the founder of process oriented psychology, which at the moment colors my way of seeing things, it is dominated by everyday and material matters, as well as socially accepted logic. In this dimension, humans are autonomous and causal, act intentionally, consciously, and identify with their actions. Cognition and orientation in space and time correspond here to the laws of classical physics. Space has three dimensions and time runs linearly. The world consists of objects with certain physical characteristics: mass, shape, electric charge, position, and speed. These objects are relatively autonomous, and when they interact, they evolve in a deterministic manner.

In this everyday, consensus reality, the consciousness of the observer of reality does not matter, because reality is objective. Elements of the human body and objects have their definite shapes and functions: the head is used for thinking, toys for playing, a chair for sitting, a lamp for lighting, ventilation for cooling the air, a curtain for decoration, and garbage belongs in the garbage can. We make a drink out of kombucha mushrooms, and latex (a.k.a. rubber) is turned into gloves or sexual gadgets – and we don’t think about the dark energy associated with the colonial origins of this material. Physics studies matter and energy, psychology studies the human mind, and art serves to deepen reflection or entertain. In this dimension of the world, we focus on states that provide an illusion of security and permanence: solid state of matter, established ways of knowing and functioning, distinct places such as home, the office, or the city, and finally, life stages and identities (e.g., a student, worker, consumer, youth, old age…).

However, what we do not see, do not know, or are afraid to discover in ourselves and in the world does not disappear and does not stop influencing us. It appears individually and collectively in the unconscious and in the dreamland, where – in Mindell’s terms – external objectivity ceases to apply, and our desires, memories, fantasies, perceptions, and feelings are expressed. What we do not identify with also manifests itself in secondary processes: in what bothers us, what happens outside our will and consciousness.

On the other hand, what we separate in order to understand and tame it more easily turns out to be more complex, dynamic, and strangely intertwined. These relationships are revealed beyond causal links, for example, in synchronicities, which according to Carl Gustav Jung are a hypothetical principle of the all-union of events and mental states. In the dreamland, the laws of classical physics, such as gravity, no longer apply. Spacetime appears to be tensile and fluid. The boundaries between persons and objects blur, objects change scale and function, time loops. Permanent states begin to blur and turn into dynamic, interactive processes.

Because the consensus reality has been privileged for centuries, we encounter an edge on the way to consciously moving to the dreamland: anxiety and attachment to social roles. However, cutting ourselves off from dream energy and unintentional desires causes life (both personal and social) to become flat, depressing, and boring, as well as hollow. It becomes just an illusion, an accepted and often idealized image.

The phantasmal spacetime, designed in the Skala Gallery by Anna Bąk, is a proposal to cross this edge. The artist designs and stimulates it as a sensual experience, which is meant to break us out of the consensus reality. The process of her work resembles an alchemical transmutation: from the analysis and understanding of matter, through its disintegration, to the creation of other matter or the extraction of other qualities from it. As a result, a head can become a thing – a support for a sofa, a lamp can be a carrier of memories, and a curtain – a disturbing stain. Matter begins to disperse and vibrate, revealing its vitality and dynamics and freeing itself from the previous functions and shapes of objects. In some objects, the dominant quality is rust, others absorb the attention with the flash of latex, sheet metal, the porous texture of glass granules or iron filings. The relationship with the senses of the viewers is also established through low-frequency sounds. Emitted from objects resembling furniture (Sounds That Come in Waves), they resonate with bodies in a non-local way, turning them into instruments. The meanings of some things and materials remain in suspension, in a potential state – they have been forgotten or not yet recognized.

As framed by quantum physics, the role of the observer – the artist and the viewer – becomes crucial, because the experienced world is represented here from the inside. Depending on how they are perceived – to paraphrase the title of the exhibition – things can come to us in waves.

In quantum experiments with matter and energy, electrons or light are, using one method of measuring, waves, and, using other research tools, particles. Because we have been trained and coached for centuries to perceive and universalize only one objective dimension of reality, most of us do not know how to draw conclusions from invisible quantum processes. However, both process oriented psychology and quantum physics offer us helpful figures of parallel worlds and superposition. When a measuring device captures a particle, its wave function does not disappear, it exists virtually (in a so-called imaginary way). The same happens when we apply purely utilitarian criteria to everyday objects – their other, unconscious qualities do not cease to exist, they just operate in parallel (unconscious, secondary) worlds. These may be, for example, emotions, energies, or the fantasies associated with them, marginalized biochemical processes (e.g., the process unpleasant to human sensibility, conventionally called decay), or still other material affairs. Superposition, on the other hand, is an assemblage of all possible states (quantum, mental) and parallel worlds – a potential reality. We can approach it without scientific tools, with an accepting openness to the signals coming from the body, our premonitions, and dreams, as well as the movement between different dimensions of reality.

Anna Bąk’s objects are just such assemblages, which – while mystifying – project the experience of matter as a multidimensional, dynamic process.

text: Joanna Sokołowska

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Ania Bąk (born in 1984) is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź. In her artistic activity she uses various means of expression: she paints and creates objects, moving images, and sounds. She has participated in numerous exhibitions in Poland and abroad, including Enblanco Gallery and Grimmuseum in Berlin, Spedition Gallery in Bremen, 9/10 Gallery and SKALA Gallery in Poznań, Galeria Czynna and Pracownia Portretu in Łódź, as well as in the festivals Trans Art in Bolzano and the Warsaw Autumn. Her recent exhibitions include Drumming the Night at Pracownia Portretu in Łódź (2019) and Comic Eyes of the Sun, Not Tears [Komiczne oczy słońca, nie łzy] (with Wera Bet) at OS17 in Szczecin (2019). In 2015 she received the scholarship of the President of the City of Łódź for people involved in artistic creation.
Since 2011 she has been working in the Multimedia Studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź. She lives in Poznań.