The haze of colonial gold, the arabesques of cigarette fumes. A dreadful soup brewed from smoke and stuffiness, the abyss – as Gombrowicz would have it – with gęby: mugs peeking out, shouting, and posturing. Dolls, intellectuals, and slackers. Gossip and gibberish. Conversations that never end, and conversations that have not yet started. This mythology, like so many others, is jotted down on paper napkins. To drink coffee. To light a cigarette. To order a cake or – as in the movie “Dziewczyny do wzięcia” (“Single girls”) – the “Sultan’s cream”. To read a book or simply to sit, eavesdropping on the conversations at the next table. To blend in with the crowd and to soak in the atmosphere, this sticky aura, marinated existential juice, vibrating with guttural laughter. To feel like the protagonist of Tyrmand’s novel, “Zły”. To feel at home. At home, which is the café.
The café is a watering place as black as ebony, it is a cabaret, a pastry shop, an intellectual salon. A musty cellar, a bohemian phantom, and a spectre – of modernity that one had slept through. It is a place of meetings, and space where opposite factions coexist. According to Peiper, the avant-garde is born in a café. Revolution is also born, and it is here that the revolution freezes, like a curiosity preserved in formalin. Ideas circulate, a bit like regulars wandering between the tables, practicing their unpretentious Robinsonade. They hatch, mature, and die before they can be written down. When inhaled and exhaled along with the thick air, they cease to belong to anyone in particular.
The celebration of drinking the beverage brought from the colonies in Arabia seduced Kraków’s Bohemians at the turn of the twentieth century, and then, for good. This is when the café became an artist’s studio. A place of long-lasting get-togethers. And then the artists began to leave their mark on the place – spilling their guts onto café interiors. Henryk Uziembło painted Art Nouveau frescoes in the fashionable Rehman’s cafe. Fin-de-siècle jet setters hauled a huge canvas into the Paon, only to scribble and paint all over it chaotically, creating one collective and indigestible picture. Tytus Czyżewski and Leon Chwistek added a futuristic mise-en-scène to the oval room at the Esplanade. Meanwhile, the members of the “Green Balloon” cabaret (café-theatre), armed with black felt-tip pens, mounted an assault on the walls of the famous Jama Michalika. Sometimes they just marked their territory, at other times they designed entire interiors. After World War II, they colonized new places, dragging the utopian spirit of coarse modernity behind them. At the café of the Dom Plastyka (House of Visual Arts), Maria Jarema painted an abstract frieze and installed a geometric curtain sewn from fabric remnants, while Wiesław Dymny decorated the Jazz Club’s bar at św. Marka street with a mural. Tadeusz Kantor arranged his own table at Krzysztofory, decorated with paintings by the members of Second Grupa Krakowska (Kraków Artist Collective), and mannequins from Cricot theatre performances. Artists not only sit in cafés. Artists are the cafés.
The café is a kind of non-obvious performance, with no specific beginning or end. It is a theatre that can be watched – either from the street outside, although this is more like window-licking, or from the inside. The café is also a text, read somewhat casually, like a morning paper with your coffee. More than a palimpsest, it resembles a sgraffito – a piling up matter – in which everyone scratches whatever message they want. Rather like the graffiti on the restroom door. Nothing happens, even if everything is happening at the same time. Tadeusz Kantor is still sitting at the bar, ranting about Café Europa. He raises an empty cup to his mouth, while explaining what constitutes a “happening” in performance art. He pretends to drink coffee until you believe that he is really drinking it. Janina Kraupe-Świderska draws horoscopes on the stained paper napkins – she divines the future from the coffee grounds settling at the bottom of the cup. Witold Gombrowicz chooses a table by the window. He orders a half-cup of black coffee and writes his “Polish Memories”: “A café can become an addiction just like vodka can. For a real habitué, not to go to the café at a designated time is simply to fall ill.”
We would like to welcome you to a place where coffee can still be had – even if it is only pretending – to the café that we have opened in a dollhouse. In the wonderland, where the door is always too small and you are too big, or vice versa; in Ibsen’s doll’s house, where the reality is intertwined with madness, and this world here connects with the netherworld. Owls are not what they seem, and the café – to paraphrase Gertrude Stein – is a café is a café is a café.
This event in a part of ‘A Thing for Art. Design in Kraków’ visual arts festival (Sztuka do rzeczy – design w Krakowie).
The exhibition was co-funded by the Municipality of Kraków www.krakow.pl
Artists: Zuzanna Bartoszek, Agata Kus, Małgorzata Markiewicz, Dominika Olszowy i Paulina Włostowska
Curators: Ania Batko i Aleksander Celusta
Coordinator: Mateusz Piegza
Translation: Dorota Wąsik
Record of the exhibition: Paweł Wyląg
Media Partner: Współczesna
22.10.2020, www.sixrooms.online
Six rooms, four artists, two curators, and three performances. One graphic designer, one photographer, a dozen or so associates and volunteers of the Unsound Festival, and several dozen employees of Kraków Municipality. The number of viewers unknown.
The exhibition takes place in three spacetimes. Everyone can see them, but no one can enter. In times of the pandemic, after one lockdown, and probably shortly before the next. Also, in the period of escalating ethnic, racial, and identity conflicts. Of the crisis and of crises. Environmental, economic, and political. At a time when modernity, by multiplying the possibility of relations, simultaneously emptied these relations of all content, and as the French philosopher Maffesoli would have it, this led to a transition from a community to a society that capitalizes on its desires.
We are part of a neo-tribe. We have our traditions and our rituals. We live on desert islands. Especially since utopia is also an island. An island that does not exist. We have been here before. We are sending hybrid letters in the bottles. We are lighting bonfires and sending smoke signals.
Is ultimate lockdown a place of radical opening?
The exhibition was co-funded by the Municipality of Kraków www.krakow.pl
Artists: Justyna Górowska, Domnika Olszowy, Mikołaj Sobczak & Nicholas Grafia
Curators: Ania Batko i Aleksander Celusta
Coordinator: Mateusz Piegza
Graphic design: Renata Motyka
Translation: Dorota Wąsik
Photography: Paweł Wyląg
Partner: Unsound Festival
Media Partner: Współczesna
11.10.2020, www.nojoyboys.itch.io
Premiere of the “Hum” computer game and promotion of the album “Нассать на мир”
The hero of this story lives in the future. In Postapoland, a strange not-quite-world from which he tries to escape at all costs. Even if it is into the past, where the thing that he is running from will have caught up with him anyway. During one of his time travels – and he does travel in time on a regular basis – he arrives in 1987. That year becomes a trap for our protagonist. A cul-de-sac that loops and chokes his body in the pickle of its sticky juices. Every December 31 he goes back to square one. The starting point and part of the “Hum” game is the album “Нассать на мир”, which Bartek Zaskórski recorded directly on a cassette tape as part of a mini-exhibition in the former studio of the Oneiron group of artists in Katowice. In 2020, the album was released by the cult label Not Not Fun Records, Los Angeles.
Curatorial collaboration: Ania Batko and Aleksander Celusta
Graphic design: Krzysztof Zdunkiewicz
Game translation: Konrad Materek
Partner: Unsound Festival
10.01 – 30.08.2020, Hotel Indigo Old Town Kraków / @kongresfuturologiczny
Spacetime No. 1: This Room Guaranteed BOMB-FREE. From the Management, Matejko Room, Hotel Indigo Old Town Kraków (18, Św. Filipa street),
5 August 2020, 6 p.m.; 6 – 9 August 2020, 5 p.m. and 6 p.m.
Spacetime No. 2: instagram @kongresfuturologiczny, 10 July – 30 August 2020
It is a luxury hotel. As the narrator Ijon Tichy says, even if it fails to save soft-boiled eggs from overcooking, it still is excellent. Especially since no hotel comes with an in-house chicken coop. The H****n has one hundred and six floors and is nearly empty. Inside there are swimming pools, solariums, tennis courts, go-kart racing tracks, roulette tables, and merry-go-rounds. There is also a shooting range where you can target selected (and previously suitably stuffed) people, and a bandstand with the option of spraying the audience with tear gas. The room offers a breathtaking view of the glaucous brown clouds of smog. A spool of standard Alpine rope hangs in the jade and jasper bathroom, and next to it there is a pole, standing three meters high. There is a camouflage cape hidden in the closet, and a sack of hardtack biscuits under the bed. On the door there is a sign: “This Room Guaranteed BOMB-FREE. From the Management”. Each of the items in the luxury suite is meant to increase the chances of hotel guest’s survival. Even the water in the tap is oozing hallucinatory fumes. …Say someone imagines that he is only imagining that he doesn’t imagine – or the other way round.
This is where the eighth Congress of Futurologists is to take place. The gathering to talk about overpopulation and the impending demographic catastrophe gets inaugurated, but it never actually happens. Moments after the conference begins, riots break out in the streets, soon escalating to a civil war. But the latter does not impress anyone, not anymore. After all, this is happening in a politically unstable world, torn by uncontrolled outbursts of social rage, and even more violent reactions from the authorities. Some congress participants, Tichy included, join the management in going down to the sewers. They breathe air polluted with hallucinogens, which the authorities have used to suppress the revolution. Our narrator is taken to the hospital, where he is induced into hibernation. He wakes up in 2039, in a perfect world. He soon discovers that it is merely powder and dust. A corpse, albeit well preserved. The apparent idyll is due to the chemical substances that program emotions, sensations, and social reflexes, even as the world, or rather the universe, is tending towards its inevitable destruction. And if it must perish, let it at least not suffer.
Stanisław Lem narrates all this in his short story “The Futurological Congress”, published in 1970. The piece is of the funny-scary genre. It is laughter through tears. Also, because this is not the first time that Lem predicted the future. Last year on Earth has been a real countdown of horrors. We wish to spare you, so we will mention just a few. Environmental, migration, social and economic crises. Conflicts on the grounds of gender, race and sexual orientation. An anthropocentric structure, which reproduces hierarchy, violence, and domination by some people at the expense of others. In the newspapers, we read about a secret climate summit in Sicily, where technology sharks and celebrities have flown in, aboard one hundred and fourteen private jets. They emitted nearly 55 thousand tons of carbon dioxide and talked about global warming. Most of them are no environmental experts, but like in Lem’s book, they do not stand idly by when they hear the cry of “Man the pumps!” In that same year, a report by independent scientists from Melbourne hit the media, predicting that as a result of climate change, related migrations and wars, our civilization will be gone by the year 2050. One of the theses of the report assumes that over 30% of the land globally, and 55% of the world’s population will be exposed to lethal conditions, beyond the threshold of human survival, for 20 days every year. Fortunately, conditions at the H****n hotel will remain tolerable. We are watching George Floyd’s death on YouTube, and on Twitter, we’re reading Trump’s comments. As riots break out in the US at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, he writes: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Meanwhile, just before the elections, Poland’s president states that LGBT (reminder: Lesbians Gays Bisexuals Transgender) are “not people”.
If only we could – as it is possible in Lem’s fiction – we would run away into the galaxy, hoping that the worst would happen in our absence. With fear, but also with relief, we would be watching the Earth turn into an overcooked potato.
We keep this civilisation narcotised, for otherwise it could not endure itself. In Lem’s story, these words are spoken by Symington, the controller of the illusion. An eschatological narcotiser and the world’s last Atlas, whose work consists in pleasing people who remain unaware of their collective agony. In his own words, he is basically an artist, and in a field that is entirely new, untouched. He cannot change the truth, therefore he hides it. What if – although that of course never happens – he went for a subversive gesture, and revealed the truth, like a magician in slow motion pulling a rabbit out of a hat? When a female intern asks Tichy if he gives his consent to being vitrified, he only replies: “Sorry, I don’t talk to apparitions”.
We are more interested in futurology than the future, and in the human hencity that is going to replace it. Also in the past ideas of the future. Visions of what reality has been or is going to be, and a vision of that reality without us. But also the present, which lately is impossible to watch unless we imagine that it is a movie that we’re watching. Or just another hallucination. Like a cellophane-wrapped alarm clock that someone dropped at a US corporate hotel pretending it was a bomb. Rather like congress participants, on the roof of another hotel, we are sipping wine. The vernissage is underway. A panoramic view of Kraków is stretched before us. Until recently, the entire city was depopulated. It was empty and dark. The Market Square, at midnight, would feel like a stage set of a disaster movie. We would love to tell you more, but we are afraid you would not endure that. What if there is no future?
When there is no bread – let them eat opium! Lem writes. Bread and circuses! They have no bread? Let them eat cake! We are merely conversing with apparitions.
“The Futurological Congress” was initially published in instalments, in the “Szpilki” journal, hence the idea to organize an exhibition divided in time and space into autonomous segments. In the context of Lem’s novel, we are interested not only in its Chinese box structure, in its critical and ironic reflection on futurology, but also in the thesis that impoverishing the world is accompanied by an escape into virtual space. The exhibition, although it might as well be a movie, takes place in two mutually complementary dimensions: the analogue reality of a hotel room, and the virtual reality of Instagram, in the form of process documentation, film footage, and video performance. Both are producing moments of relief, and hallucinatory conversations with apparitions.
Special thanks to: Kola Śliwińska, Paweł Wyląg, Agnieszka Wranka
The exhibition is part of: “The Futurological Congress. An interdisciplinary arts project focused around Stanisław Lem’s work”.
The exhibition was co-funded by the Municipality of Kraków www.krakow.pl
Artists: Justyna Górowska, Inside Job (Ula Lucińska i Michał Knychaus), Karolina Jarzębak, Wiktoria Walendzik, Jakub Gliński
Curators: Ania Batko and Aleksander Celusta
Coordinator: Mateusz Piegza
Graphic design: Renata Motyka
Translation: Dorota Wąsik
Record of the exhibition: Paweł Wyląg
17.11 – 08.12.2019, Studencka 25, Kraków
Awdotia (tragically): “I did not expect this from you, comrade husband. Is this why we had the revolution in 1917, to cruise around in cars? To own bloody fridges? What else do you require? Toothbrushes, maybe? Is it beneath you to clean your teeth with your fingers? Think about what you’re doing! Do you no longer wish to toil for the revolution? Don’t you care about the production quotas anymore, our joy, our blood and sweat…?”
Psichow: “Blood and sweat, to be sure, but why shouldn’t I have a fridge?”
Awdotia: “Husband, reject this at the root, these filthy roots creeping and grovelling to the Western civilization. What do you need a fridge for? What are you going to keep in it, your pants? Stop it or I will go to comrade Tegonieradze, he will knock some sense into you and make you forget all about the fridge.” (She makes the sign of the cross)
“Korzenie. Drrama wielorakie” [“(Creeping) Roots. Multiple Drrama”] is a short piece for puppet theatre, overflowing with grotesque and black humour, which Stanisław Lem was supposed to have written (admittedly, there are two versions of the same story) together with Roman Husarski – sculptor, ceramist and one of the creators of an innovative technique of wall painting, called “piropiktura” [“pyro-painting”].
“(Creeping) Roots” were written in the early 1950s as a mocking satire on the times of Stalinism, on consumerism and imperialist tendencies of the Soviet comrades. Besides, the two also wrote another play in which they criticized imperialism, for a change. The latter bore a palatable title “Yacht Paradise”. And while the latter was published and staged against the background of luxury furnishings, Lem put away the first, in a folder between two crime novels, and he forgot where he had hidden it, forever.
Pottery, glass, furniture, and mosaic murals from the times of the People’s Republic of Poland (PRL). Design produced in cooperatives and workshops, whose tradition suddenly came to a standstill at the end of the 1980s, recently has experienced something of a second honeymoon. Following the years dedicated to assembling IKEA furniture, these vintage objects again captivated us: with their colours, compositions, and shapes. With their formalism, spiced up with a hint of nostalgia, in which you can feel the breeze of Western modernism and organic abstraction. Pikasiaki – “Picassoes” – and New Look exude a beauty that is slightly old-fashioned and yet still modern, paradoxically. It enchants us. Even if we sense that there is something strange, slightly sinister about it. A peculiar aura of curiosity – rather like glassworks operating at night, illegally, tarnishing the glass in the windows of houses across the street. Crumbs, which – as in the play by Lem and Husarski – accidentally fall into the soda recovery boiler, and although someone’s head will roll, the production quota is met. And the fridge – in the same play – heating its contents, instead of cooling them.
We are drawn to bizarre and non-linear stories. Stories, which it might be convenient to forget about. Stories, which are easy to overlook and hide away. Like the one about a mosaic of ceramic tiles that originally depicted a Pegasus but after being dismantled and reassembled by construction workers, it turned into a geometric abstraction. Or another story, about the pitchers with phallic handles, cast on the occasion of Barbórka (miners’ holiday), or weird glass shoes and grotesque genitals that glassworks worker cast for fun – often together with glass designers – from the leftover material, and after hours; they were either slightly tipsy, or they did it as a warm-up exercise, to lighten their grip. Or another story, about poisonous reagents or health-hazard-posing technologies used by the ceramists who were often gamblers and scientists, in equal parts. Husarski himself, and his wife Helena were such crazy ceramicists who, by trial and error, fired the pottery white-hot and blended liquid glaze into it with burners. Like pictures painted with fire.
We are fascinated by selenium, cobalt and manganese. By fluorite, which precipitates like sugar. By toxic lead oxides and copper oxides that produce six different colours, ranging from red to blue. Even by the Minister’s regulation stating that any given glass object must not contain more than six to eight bubbles of air. And by the “ixi” washing powder added to the glass in response to the same regulation, following the advice of a cleaning lady – it ended up producing excess of foam. Experiments and mistakes, of which the latter often brought more interesting results.
The case of Łysa Góra, a place with no previous traditions, which – thanks to the phenomenon of Franciszek Mleczko, incidentally, in his “quest for the roots” – becomes a model village, a magnet to the Krakow milieu. A model village with a kindergarten, a factory, and a school. The famous “Kamionka” (stoneware manufacturing cooperative), with fields and meadows around it scattered with crumbs and splinters of ceramic dishes. Even though – to begin with – the pots leaked, the tiles fell apart, and the employees went to work in the field instead the factory.
Perhaps the most interesting revolutions are those that have been dreamt and slept through. The utopias, and the dystopias. Unique artworks fired at night, and authorless pieces made in the light of day. The designs – including those drawn on paper napkins – which nobody counted, recorded, or inventoried. The technology that has never been properly described or set down in writing – and why should it be, when everyone knew it by heart? The artist’s cooperation with the technician, and the craftsman’s cooperation with the artist. Cooperatives that appear as oases of freedom. Madeira vase, named so because when inverted, it reminded someone of a glass of the luxury liquor. The overly expensive furniture by “Ład” cooperative, and the pressed glass – poor man’s “crystals”. Democratic, mass, egalitarian design – preferably, for export. To the west, which – as per usual – turns out to be a measure of success. The theme for one more newspaper headline: “Polish ceramics in the USA!”
Because even a tea glass, says Horbowy, is a political topic. One day, Gomułka stopped at the “Goliath” glass that Horbowy had designed, seeing in it a proof of corrupting the working class with alcohol. Someone from his entourage explained to the First Secretary that this was, fortunately, an export commodity.
In this sense, the roots are not just something nurturing, something you go back to, but also something that’s creeping and grovelling. The inheritance of our ancestors; but also the grovelling, bowing a little to the East, a little to the West. On either side of the same sun. Bowing before the familiar history, but also the one that needs unearthing, digging out of the rubble. Also the one that has been hidden – like many mosaics were – behind plasterboard or fibreboard, on top of which fresh glaze was applied. The roots: both nurturing and creeping.
Warfałamotwiej: “What do you mean, creeping? That I creep and grovel? Ah, but it’s so pleasant… you can breathe… you can do whatever you want…”
The exhibition is a kind of an open salon. It is a place where the past meets the future; product meets waste; whole meets the leftovers. It is evoking history, unawares. It is dreaming, over and over again, of one and the same story. But it is also pretending – that nothing has changed. As Hansen wanted it: there are no curtains in the windows, and the table is pushed against the wall. This set, as in the movie “Marriage of Convenience”, is not for sale. Everything here is ex-display.
The exhibition will be accompanied by guided walks around the city and by study visits.
This event in a part of ‘A Thing for Art. Design in Kraków’ visual arts festival (Sztuka do rzeczy – design w Krakowie).
The exhibition was co-funded by the Municipality of Kraków www.krakow.pl
Artists: Bogusław Bachorczyk, Marcin Janusz, Paweł Olszczyński
Curators: Ania Batko and Aleksander Celusta
Graphic design: Renata Motyka
Translation: Dorota Wąsik
Record of the exhibition: Paweł Wyląg
08.10 – 27.11.2019, Grodzka 43, Kraków
43, Grodzka street. A tenement house in the city centre. Once a home of Adam Męciński, then the Szaniawski family mansion. During the People’s Republic of Poland, it was converted into flats. Later, seat of a club with the alluring name of Dolce Vita, soon destined to disappear, or rather, to transform into another shell of fledgling capitalism. More recently, the building housed a Bingo parlour, decorated with mirrors, hung on pistachio-coloured walls, with a red carpet and a bar top of dark cherry wood. It is an open secret what else went on here, besides the old-fashioned game of Bingo.
If we were to scratch at the outer pastelosis and subsequent layers of paint, superimposed one on another, it is not unlikely that we might discover nineteenth-century murals below. Perhaps we might touch the present, but also the future ruin, let ourselves be charmed by the sticky nostalgia and the poignant leftovers, scattered here and there. Anyway, this exhibition is more of a stage design than an art installation. Setting for a film that was never made, a theatre play that was never written. It is also a kind of dramatized landscape, spiced up with a theatrical, somewhat kitschy flavour. The kind of landscape you would see years later in Chernobyl, with a funfair, a pile of masks and a crowd of plastic dolls – a landscape that isn’t. And never has been. And even so, it is beautiful. We were walking past the greenhouse, the tomatoes so red. You long to eat them, and your soul aches. Said one of the residents of the zone. Apparently, in Greek, ‘nostalgia’ means pain from an old wound. It is an abscess of suffering, our companion between two infinities, writes Michel Houellebecq. And it’s a blessing, time travel, a madeleine and a panel of yellow wall, says Marcel Proust.
Those affected by the plague of nostalgia do not always know what they are longing for. And yet they feel the longing. They rarely prophesy, but they predict. They tell the future from the delaminating cover of thick sugary icing, or better, from monstrous stains of unnaturally red ketchup. They laugh, but always on the brink of tears.
Ruin is primarily a process, a clump of past and future, chewed up and pulverised. The carousel effect, turning round and round. There is a Robert Smithson experiment, in which a child runs around a sandbox filled with white and black sand, until the sand gets mixed, only to regretfully discover in the next scene that if he runs in the opposite direction, the sand will not only fail to return to its previous state, but it will turn even more grey.
There is something very tempting in the idea of the end of the world. You can feel the levity of things final, but also the lightness of freedom, suddenly regained. Just like skipping classes without planning to. The protagonists of “The Architect of Ruins”, the iconic novel by Herbert Rosendorfer from the late 1960s, lock themselves inside an unfinished shelter shaped like a cigar facing downwards, where they feed on gruesome and bleakly humorous anecdotes, spinning a yarn that falls apart, patchy and perforated with numerous gaps. A narrative that never ends, but it prolongs our agony, endlessly. Meanwhile, outside, extermination may be happening. A bloody apocalypse is ensuing. The epilogue continues flaking. Again, the novel titled “The World” may have ended, but the story itself goes on being told. And it won’t stop. And yet, it seems, we have heard it somewhere before.
Tenement house at number 43 in Grodzka street was sold a few months ago. Soon it will undergo thorough revitalization. It will be turned into a hotel or a restaurant. For some time at least, the ruin will be forgotten. It will become a mere memory. Which does not mean that it will not one day return.
The exhibition was co-funded by the Municipality of Kraków www.krakow.pl
Artists: Krzysztof Gil, Jakub Gliński, Martyna Kielesińska, Marta Krześlak, Bartosz and Tomasz Zaskórski
Curators: Ania Batko and Aleksander Celusta
Graphic design: Renata Motyka
Translation: Dorota Wąsik
Record of the exhibition: Paweł Wyląg
Partner: Unsound
18.11 – 02.12.2018 , Henryk Gallery, Kraków
Henryk Cooperative” exhibition is the voice of the generation of young artists in the discussion on the fate and artistic heritage of producers and workshops from the People’s Republic of Poland era. In their work, exhibition participants tried to match the work of the artists and artisans of that time. The resulting installation, reminiscent of a typical living room of the period, was supplemented with historic pieces, on loan from private collections.
This event in a part of ‘A Thing for Art. Design in Kraków’ visual arts festival (Sztuka do rzeczy – design w Krakowie).
The exhibition was co-funded by the Municipality of Kraków www.krakow.pl
Artists: Natalia Kopytko, Renata Motyka oraz Spółdzielnia Pracy Henryk w zespole z hutnikami: Krzysztofem Chytkowskim, Dariuszem Winklerem
Curator: Aleksander Celusta
Architectural collaboration: Mateusz Piegza
Set design: Przemek Krupski, Bartek Kieżun
Translation: Dorota Wąsik
Record of the exhibition: Paweł Wyląg
16.11.2018 – 05.01.2019, l’étrangère, Londyn (UK)
The show is comprised of a single installation, entitled TAJSA Yesterday and Tomorrow (2018), which takes as its point of departure the ritual of ‘Heidenjachten’ or ‘Gypsy-hunt’, prevalent in Germany and the Netherlands from the seventeenth until as late as the nineteenth centuries.
The installation, a shelter-like construction made from raw canvas and fragments of wooden planks and connected with threads, ropes and bone glue, imitates the traditional, humble and temporary houses erected by itinerant Roma communities. Inside the shelter is a large panoramic tableau that depicts a procession of hunters, animals and human corpses, drawn with white chalk on a black background. The characters have been inspired by the Rembrandt painting, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp (1632), in which Dr Tulp presents a public dissection to members of the Amsterdam Guild of Surgeons. Gil’s drawings of the hunters’ trophy heap, which includes a deer, a hare, a bird and a Roma, perversely resembles the aestheticised paintings of the Dutch still-life tradition.
Krzysztof Gil (b. 1987, Kraków) is of Polish Roma origins and grew up in Nowy Targ, Poland. Between 2008-2013, he studied Graphic Design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. He is the recipient of the Jolanta Kwaśniewska Foundation scholarship ‘Understanding without Barriers’, and a three-time recipient of the Polish Minister of Interior and Administration scholarship. In 2008, he co-founded the artistic group Romani Art, and is also involved in social activities that oppose discrimination and social exclusion. He is a member of the ternYpe International Roma Youth Network, which helps young Roma people to become active citizens. As he says: ‘From the beginning of my artistic education at high school in Krakow, the topic of Roma has been extremely important to me. Now, years later, I realised that I had to look at my culture from different perspectives and take more distance. It helped me to get involved in projects against intolerance and stereotypes. In 2013, Gil began his PhD at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. His topic is the correlation between the past, present and future of the Roma people, as represented by the Roma word ‘tajsa’, which translates as both ‘today’ and ‘tomorrow.
The exhibition is supported by the Municipality of Kraków, Poland and the Polish Cultural Institute, London, UK.
Artist: Krzysztof Gil
Curator: Wojtek Szymański
Coordinator: Aleksander Celusta, Kola Śliwińska
02.02 – 02.03.2018 Henryk Gallery, Kraków
Paweł Susid’s works are prêt-a-porter placards for various parades. „First, oil, then, tempera, then, acrylic.” He carries them in a march for art. „A painter gets tired, but then again…. who doesn’t. I think they sold me shabby brushes. I tried to paint small paintings. Even the weakest one will be of lesser use in killing another man.” In a march against evil politics. „Under this minister … duty attack or national defence will not be performed. Entering an exhibition. After leaving Rydzyk you will convert to Islam and turn into F. Dzerzhinsky St.”. In a protest against absurdities and thoughtlessness. „Have dominion over the earth. The Józef Cyrankiewicz comb”. In a demonstration of public sentiment. „The 20th century’s over, things will be better now. The next generation isn’t bad, but one needs to stay on the watch”. He offers a lapidary and concise utterance of a humorous thought or a serious philosophical truth. „Jesus, fuck. If everything’s so nice why do I fell like throwing up?”
Bartosz Flak
The exhibition was co-funded by the Municipality of Kraków. www.krakow.pl
Artist: Paweł Susid
Curator: Aleksander Celusta
Coordinator: Mateusz Piegza
Translation: Piotr Sylwester Mierzwa
Record of the exhibition: Grzegorz Mart
A cycle of workshops on contemporary art and architecture, 01.05.2017 – 31.12.2018
The Object – Space – City project is a cycle of free, open-access workshops focused on various contemporary art and architecture phenomena, embedded in the urban fabric of Kraków. The program of workshops was constructed around the following modules: Object, Space, and the City. The proposed project was addressed to three age groups: 7-12-year-olds, 12-15-year-olds, and adults. The formula and the execution of individual tasks were adjusted to the age of target groups and the themes addressed. The goal of the project was above all to increase the knowledge of the participants in the field of contemporary art and architecture, by applying appropriate educational and cognitive tools. The participants also joined in the creative, artistic activities.
The project was founded upon the belief that contemporary art may sometimes be perceived by society at large as a difficult, obscure, and elitist sphere, accessible only to the select few. Many recipients believe that it is a necessary condition for getting more deeply involved in visual arts to possess expert qualifications and extensive knowledge of art history. Instead, we believe that it is the task of educators to present art in a way that is accessible for persons with a variety of cultural competences and experiences. In this project, we hope to share our own knowledge as well as the knowledge of all the invited guests.
The project was co-financed from the funds of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.
Coordination: Mateusz Piegza
Visual branding: Renata Motyka
Translation: Dorota Wąsik
Photo documentation: Grzegorz Mart