Signal box/Nastawnia — a building/place beside the railway track…
The ‘Signal box/Nastawnia’ is warning. The sign is losing its informative function, becoming an oppressive tool — a life organiser in the hand of various authorities: economic, social, state, and religious. The presented works are signalising problems and dangers, throwing us off the obedient subordination to the imposed trends and directions and encouraging us to become critical citizens.
‘Signal box/Nastawnia’ is confronting. The visual aspect of the presented works that are influencing one another is shaping the area of interpenetrating meanings and playing colours which are traditionally ascribed to certain signs…
… from where signals, points and other elements of railway infrastructure are served and controlled.
The exhibition ‘Signal box/Nastawnia’ was devoted to the use of signs, signals and symbols in art narrations. It showed the wide range of possibilities: from works directed towards a logotype, simplifying the expression, where an image becomes a sign, up to free sign and symbol games and manipulations which deconstruct their former meaning in the context of the present day. ‘Signal box/Nastawnia’ is at the same time a historical outline of the problem: from the cycle ‘Towards the Man’ by Jarosław Modzelewski of 1980 up to the ‘Refrigerator’ by Łódź Kaliska of 2004.
A sign is naturally predestined to be an object of artistic activity. Today we couldn’t imagine any area of life which would function without signalisation, indication, etc. The unprecedented gap between culture and nature ‘reached’ in the 20th century seems to be an ultimate fact which is impossible to reverse, relieve or reconcile. The sign and the symbol play one of the more important parts, conditioning certain cultural order. Further, symbols start to be signposts conditioning the mental plan.
The multitude, interpenetration and coexistence of signs and symbols can build chaos or a labyrinth that has its own purpose. In both cases servicemen are imagined and unclear in their reasons and actions.
