BWA Contemporary Art Gallery in Katowice

The project of the cycle of exhibitions entitled ‘Medium… Post… Mortem…’ is an attempt of reflection on, diagnosing of the condition and potential of contemporary art in the context of the changes and redefinition of the medium, which occurred during the last few decades. For the author of the project, the ideas of mutual penetration and joining the qualities of various media within one work were the starting point for the project. Hence, the presented works show the process and evocation of transgressive thinking about work and medium. Also because of those reasons the presented exhibitions are first of all a manifestation of works which articulate the matrix problem and methods of its exceeding in the material, media and conceptual understanding.

Both editions of the exhibition ‘Medium… Post… Mortem…’ are a statement about the present shape, potential and status quo of a work of art, and first of all about the evolution of thinking about the medium, which happened in result of some radical redefinitions in art of the 70s and the emerging of the conceptual paradigm of artistic practices. Following those changes, as we remember, certain redefinitions of the means of expression and the work itself appeared, as well as the development of electronic media, digital multiplication and the appearance of inter-media and multimedia. It is not unimportant that today we live in completely different realities yet than Warhol or Rauschenberg had lived. Correlations between the sphere of authority and knowledge and the space of visibility are good exemplifications of that. A symptomatic example of those relations and tangles can be the sociological, political and aesthetical repercussions of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 2001.

In result of the ensuing changes and the conversion of the sphere of visibility, art is in the face of a new situation, another world, other media and other style of thinking. Unexpectedly the process of deconstruction and reconstruction of the traditional medium became, in fact, an ontological and eschatological problem. This is because it concerns both art and life, referring to the work of art and to the man.

The cycle of exhibitions ‘Medium… Post… Mortem…’ is a perverse exemplification of that situation. The curator of the project meant the exhibition as a show of the critical states of the work, art and reality... Hence the conception of showing the process in two dimensions, the semantic and the mythographical one. On the one hand the presented works are to represent the transgression on the level of language, since they are the effect of exceeding the traditional medium (for example painting, photography, sculpture, etc.), and on the other hand they are to articulate the world of representation, which undergoes changes, transition and passing by. Thus the exhibitions are accumulating works and showing artistic attitudes, the starting point (or a binding context) of which are artistic realisations showing the aspect of mobility or transgression on the level of the matrix, sign and artist.

Irrespective of the problem of a medium exceeding its limitations, also the critical states of the presented world are the important topics of these exhibitions. In this context eschatological problems and the theme of abject (the traumatic contents of a subject, which are driven away from consciousness) can be shown — à rebours — in an affirmative perspective — as a process of decay and simultaneous appearance of new forms. Irrespective of that the aesthetisation undertaken by certain artists doesn’t have to mean any aesthetical relativism, but rather showing the ‘eye of the storm’ which pulses underground in the work, being hidden under some decorative or ornamental forms.

Roman Lewandowski
Author of the project and curator of the exhibition.

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