Collection

The installation documents the transformations in the area of the former Gdańsk Shipyard, perceived as the place of birth, boom, and decline of the ‘Solidarity’ workers’ movement and an example of the thriving shipbuilding industry. For a number of years (1999-2013), Szlaga recorded the progressing destruction of the shipyard. He photographed the architectural transformations, the devastation of grand, and 19th-century brick buildings, such as the Director’s Villa with a library, as a symbol of the decline of the culture and intellectual thought that had been present since the establishment of the shipyard. The muted colours and expertly composed landscapes and portraits are a symbolic record of Poland’s transformation, the wasted human potential and painful processes of change that took place in the countries of Eastern and Central Europe.

The work consists of three individual elements in the form of the letters S, O, and S, shaped from welded sheet metal and filled with metal and wood scraps and fragments of equipment collected from the Gdańsk Shipyard.

This work is a repository of material remnants of the shipyard’s heritage, a material document of protest and social mobilization, expressed with the use of seemingly redundant remainders of a declining workplace. While it was created as a monument-sculpture, the piece also serves as an object for community activities, an example of which was rolling it around the buildings in the degraded post-industrial areas.

The performance consists of choreography and sounds created by shipyard workers, directed by Wollny and Szwajgier. The authors of the compositions use similarities between the structure of the working day and the typical structure of a song. Fragments of free time are distinguished from parts of the work, just as verses can be separated from choruses. The free time (verses) is subtle, soothing and kind of disappears in space — with fragments of conversations, playing ping-pong, and opening beer cans. The refrains (work) are loud, with relentless sounds of metal objects, light and heavy-duty tools, sounds of grinding and welding (and the accompanying almost baroque sparks of light) that fill the entire hall. Through their performance, the men furnish the memory of the shipyard with a bodily dimension, in which sound becomes the carrier of memories.

Wollny, who typically incorporates the local context (both architecture and people) into her compositions, constructs an interesting tension between the labour of the workers that results in a material practical object (for example a ship), and an artistic work whose product is a work of art. In this case, both work and free time become activities that have succumbed equally to capitalist rule.

The video does not have a clear beginning and end. Like the eponymous matter it overflows through the screen. The grain is poured over, piled up and put into the round bodily forms that rest on the protagonist's lap. In smaller and larger fragments, a naked female body emerges from under it. Parallel to this mystery of nature (next to the grain there are beets, parsley and geraniums) and female primordiality (the sound of breathing dominates in the background), scenes of the artist wearing a red jumpsuit and wig take place. The grain is replaced by white feathers. Subjectivity and intuition have replaced here the structural, systemic and analytical elements that characterized the experimental film of the previous decade. In these thoroughly sensual rituals, filled with both erotic and fetish elements, as well as references to archetypal meanings, Tyszkiewicz was ceaselessly performing using her body.

Created in the late 1990s by a beginner photographer, the documentary series Suburbia is a record of the socio-economic transformation of Gdańsk and its working-class residents.

The first photographs in this series were taken on the day Lech Wałęsa lost the presidential election in 1995, and the last ones in the year of Poland's accession to the European Union. Wierzbicki became interested in the changing landscape of the marginal districts as a result of their economic exclusion from the organism of the almost thousand-year-old city that built its power on the access to the sea and the mouth of the largest Polish river. The author chose the most symbolic areas of the collapsing Gdańsk Shipyard and the vicinity of the Motława and Vistula rivers with harbours and fishing. These two distinctive areas today represent the global transformations that are now taking place.

Suburbia is an important document, a invaluable record of the decline of old Gdańsk, and simultaneously a contribution to a narrative about the presence and absence of man and the disappearing culture of labour as a value in the contemporary neoliberal world.

Today, the Friends from the Seaside neon sign is displayed in the main hall and common space of the newly opened NOMUS in Gdańsk, where it acts as a trademark, and simultaneously draws attention to a specific section of the Tri-City art scene and indicates the focus of the new institution. The overlapping and interlocking model of teamwork that led to the creation of this space – alongside the city’s history, the legacy of political and social events, the ideas of freedom, solidarity, equality, and openness – define NOMUS’s symbolic identity.

The Witkowski artistic duo create projects inspired by everyday family life and social life to an equal extent. In 2005–2006 the couple became interested in the symbolic dimension of architecture, which resulted in the creation of three video works addressing the individuality of urban spaces.

Remote Viewer is a collection of views of a modern, but impersonal city. Static shots and the graininess of the image, bring to mind documentary footage. The strange atmosphere is enhanced by the editing and ambient music. The piece tells a story about alienation in a metropolis and is a kind of warning against the discrepancy between modernity and the need to live within a community.

The Witkowski artistic duo create projects inspired by everyday family life and social life to an equal extent. In 2005–2006 the couple became interested in the symbolic dimension of architecture, which resulted in the creation of three video works addressing the individuality of urban spaces.

The first, only, best is a video focusing on a neglected park in Chorzów. It shows its lawns, elements of architecture and equipment, as well as monstrous figures of dinosaurs. The video is interspersed with archival photos from the publication documenting the park in Chorzów during its heyday in the 1960s. The narrative, in a dispassionate and monotonous tone, describes a landscape known from the past, humorously contrasted with the present state of the park.

The Witkowski artistic duo create projects inspired by everyday family life and social life to an equal extent. In 2005–2006 the couple became interested in the symbolic dimension of architecture, which resulted in the creation of three video works addressing the individuality of urban spaces.

The Past can be read as a symbolic depiction of two political systems and transformations that have occurred with the emergence of new opportunities and moods within Polish society. The work is an ironic take on the history of abandoned and forgotten spaces.

In the 1980s, Sławomir Witkowski’s work consisted of simple graphic depictions of questions related to violence and aggression. His works from this period are characterized by the use of strong outlines, intense colours and straight lines and right angles. Interrogation was created in 1986. The expressive form of the lithography is emphasised by the use of dynamic, black lines, a grotesque depiction of the protagonists, and intense red and yellow colours. Interrogation is extremely expressive, and its emotional load is additionally emphasised by the title. It refers to the atmosphere and the realities of Poland in the 1980s, illustrating the tension between society and the state.  

Witkowski’s work from this period fits into the trend of new expression, indicating social and political moods. The traditional graphic workshop was treated seriously, and almost every stage of the printing process had to be well-thought-out and more or less predictable. The artistic rebellion of the 1980s also brought about changes in this field. As a result, artists have departed from academic practices associated with the traditional approach to both the subject and technology in favour of innovative solutions that resulted in the introduction of colour and the unrestricted treatment of material in the graphic arts workshop. Witkowski’s work from that period was exhibited at national exhibitions presenting ‘new expression’ art.

Sławomir Witkowski created Liberators in 1988. It is a poster referring to the ‘new expression’ aesthetics characteristic of that time, which is distinguished by intense colours, expressive lines and contours as well as engagement and opposition to existing reality. The title refers to saviours and protectors, while the speeding car captured in a dynamic composition, similar in appearance to the American Cadillac, can be understood as a symbol of the success and prosperity that were unattainable in socialist Poland in the 1980s. The proverbial American dream — the national ethos of the United States, which refers on the one hand to the ideals of democracy, equality and freedom, and on the other indicates the idolizing of success and the possibility of rapid social and economic advancement – symbolizes the values that people fought for in Poland by opposing the then political system. The car is not only a reflection of the prevailing socio-political moods, but also an indication of the cultural aspects of the consumerist lifestyle, promoted, for example, by advertising.

The performance consists of choreography and sounds created by shipyard workers, directed by Wollny and Szwajgier. The authors of the compositions use similarities between the structure of the working day and the typical structure of a song. Fragments of free time are distinguished from parts of the work, just as verses can be separated from choruses. The free time (verses) is subtle, soothing and kind of disappears in space — with fragments of conversations, playing ping-pong, and opening beer cans. The refrains (work) are loud, with relentless sounds of metal objects, light and heavy-duty tools, sounds of grinding and welding (and the accompanying almost baroque sparks of light) that fill the entire hall. Through their performance, the men furnish the memory of the shipyard with a bodily dimension, in which sound becomes the carrier of memories.

Wollny, who typically incorporates the local context (both architecture and people) into her compositions, constructs an interesting tension between the labour of the workers that results in a material practical object (for example a ship), and an artistic work whose product is a work of art. In this case, both work and free time become activities that have succumbed equally to capitalist rule.