Strong Desires — Piotr Urbaniec and Magdalena Lazar
We kindly invite you to the opening of the exhibition 7th October, 2016 at 6 pm
The exhibition will last till 23th October 2016
Strong Desires is a non-verbal exhibition, as all artefacts are derived from simple actions. Here, you will find all sorts of physical activities, including jumping, marching, rolling over in sand or flower-picking.
Although Magda Lazar’s and Piotr Urbaniec’s test actions seem to differ, they are grounded in the same kind of premises. ‘In the past, with the eyes of imagination I saw myself as a firefighter determined to maintain water circulation in nature; the one who ritually fills to overflowing, being sensitive to every single splash and whistle made by boiling liquid’, says Urbaniec. Adult now, he is an artist who likes to spend time constructing devices that would act as he pleases. And so he came up with a hot iron landing on a slab of butter, a book being buried under sand trickling from a funnel attached to a lamp, a milk bottle being stabbed with a knife. ‘Whispering Machine’ blows warm air right in the viewer’s face, emitting a sound that sounds like muffled breathing. Then, in the gallery wall, the artist has made a heart-shaped cut-out; peeping through it, we can see an object-fetish in the room next door.
Lazar is interested in exaggerated categorisation, as well as in time and space control. Her works extend over a couple of fields - natural science, physiotherapy and futurology. In this exhibition she shows a selection of objects related to danger on demand, such as when a delicate townie can feel both goose bumps and a pleasant thrill. She pictures the blissful states of mind of a self-reliant traveller, carefully tending to the weariness and indifference caused by many days spent in the wilds. In an attempt to illustrate her intuitions, and following Duchamp’s chocolate grinders, Lazar enlists help from Marcin Pazera, and both artists build an out-of-control metronome, which is connected to an ice-axe, whose blade is only a millimetre away from scratching the wall.
Trying to outdo each other in documenting their fancies, Urbaniec and Lazar defy the constraint of being useful and the regime of work and meaningfulness. Surrealist objects allow them to free their imagination and creative powers. Viewers are presented with archives of experienced pleasures. Urbaniec is doing the hula hoop on the surface of a lake. Lazar is recreating the mechanics of survival expeditions. Contributing their chapters to the big book of the para-science of whimsies, they stay away from melancholia.
Curator: Marta Lisok
