Collection

Prophetically entitled Only those who planned will survive, the piece refers to the apocalypse anticipated by all generations.

Piotr Wyrzykowski attempts to illustrate the systemic and violent policy towards European societies, using extensive media. Transporting the events of everyday life underground creates negative associations: from being forced to hide from persecutors, for example during WWII, to the enslavement of children and women by deviants or pimps. The formal aspect of the videos enhances the atmosphere of horror: the image is black and white, high-contrast; the vignette frames seem to come from an archival record created decades ago. The video is accompanied by an ambient sound that seems to emanate from the abyss.

Wyrzykowski turns our attention towards the politicization of everyday life and control. In this installation, he shows how far the system of power penetrates into personal space and determines the actions of individuals. Both the world in which we’ll have to survive and the awareness of this inevitability in the face of new threats are both oppressive.

The Performance Archive consists of items from the first half of the 1990s, when performances in front of the public were Piotr Wyrzykowski’s fundamental form of artistic expression. It is both a testimony to the formation of the artist's creative programme and an expression of consistent statements about performance and the artist’s understanding of the ways in which the body experiences media that establish new areas of communication and accumulation and strengthen and expand the spatial and temporal dimensions of bodily activity. The themes present in early performances are developed in Wyrzykowski’s later work.

The eponymous Homoiomeries is a term from Anaxagoras’ philosophy describing the ‘parts of all things’, the qualitatively indivisible elementary particles of the universe. These elements, mixed together, set in motion by the divine, gave birth to matter. Zawicki, in turn, arranges these into models and mock-ups, sculptural prototypes, and simultaneously creates compositions based on Dutch still life paintings, in order to subject the resulting forms to the illusion and reality of the canvas. Contemporary objects appear in these tangibly organic, hallucinogenic representations-visions that make it impossible to identify any leading or coherent history. Small plastic toys or fragments of everyday plastic objects will exist in this world of matter for a long time, because their time of decay is much longer than that of vegetables and fruit in the compositions of Dutch masters.

In Agata Zbylut's work, the body and convention play a leading role, and they most often appear in a duet: the conventions of representation and the exposure of bodies, the conventions of bodily beauty and aesthetics, conventional social roles of the body, everyday expectations towards the body and women’s bodies in general. Zbylut explores how the body finds itself in these conventions, how it succumbs to them and how it can effectively exceed them, or even dissipate them.

It would be hard to perceive Caviar Patriot as the artist’s self-portrait. It is a sculpture-installation created of white and red scarves of the Polish national football team, which shatters the question of women's roles, beauty canons, social norms and poses difficult questions about patriotism, the right to national colours and the changeability of understanding what Polishness means. At a time of the presidential elections, when according to some, adjectives such as ‘national’, ‘patriotic’, ‘Polish’ gave an excuse to exclude various members of the community, and according to others, government propaganda promoted ‘stadium’ patriotism, excluding the archetypes of Polishness.