Agata MichowskaThe third failed attempt to create the world 26.10—15.11.2021

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.

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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.”