BWA Contemporary Art Gallery in Katowice

The catalogue summarising the cycle of exhibitions ‘Accidental Pleasures’, which was held at the Small Hall of the BWA Contemporary Art Gallery in Katowice has been available on the market since December 2009.
The project included four exhibitions which showed artistic recipes for pleasure, given by a dozen or so invited artists as follows: Erwina Ziomkowska, Michał Gayer, Mikołaj Grospierre, Łukasz Skąpski, Grzegorz Sztwiertnia, Karolina Szymanowska, Basia Bańdo, Małgorzata Markiewicz, Michał Smandek, Katarzyna Skrobiszewska, Paweł Szejbel, Kuba Dąbrowski, Radek Szlaga and Bartek Buczek. The project was planned to be an area of diffused movement, without clearly stated direction of development. The project was to provoke ferment on a micro scale; it’s an exchange of ideas and inspirations, a year-long situation, a test of strength and an almost imperceptible vibration of the ground. Apart from attempts at defining the title notion and classical discussion of individual realisations, the catalogue includes interviews and talks between the invited artists, as well as short stories and essays.
The book combines all the four editions, at the same time keeping and presenting their separate character. The very book was to be a pleasure. Hence the quality of paper which is used for the wrapper (Plike), with its characteristic soft velvet coat. Even at first touch it provokes gestures of stroking, and the openings of the title are enticing to look inside. The red wrapping, partly unveiling the picture of the cover, gives a sensual taste to the whole. The baroque multitude of elements and effects inside underlines the variety within the framework of the cycle which compares works by recognised artists with the young ones who use all accessible media, including smell and touch. The green shade of the first part entitled ‘Conceptual Pleasures’ shows the logics or rules that govern the writing as a system. The second edition called ‘Strolls in Melted Chocolate’ was focused on pleasures and inconveniences of accommodating the body to the surrounding space. Pink colour is used here since it seems it matches to inability of the subject to accept its own materiality behind which the necessity of decay is hidden. The third part entitled ‘Enthusiasts’ is blue and includes unaffected gestures of the artists, resulting from keeping the mind in the state of permanent oversensitivity. These tiny interventions turned them into discoverers reporting their discoveries as they breaks, or in experimenters overwhelmed with a total idea of making all effort to transfer their own fascinations to the audience irrespective of the high risk of failure. The title enthusiasm strikes the toughest with its first wave, when it smashes into pieces everything that bars the way. The shade of red is assigned to the fourth edition entitled ‘A Tiger Has Almost Devoured Me’. Within the framework of this exhibition the artists, with their littered Sarmatian imagination bubbling in wait for eruption, have reconstructed the scenes that refer to boasts and shredded stories from books or shaman initiation story, where an episode of being devoured by a wild beast is an intrinsic element of the plot.
Colour divisions in the book are arranging the works in groups and sets devoted to the brief expressions of pleasures squeezed into the stiff format of gallery circulation. The arrangement of the book corresponds to the assumptions of the cycle. Its notebook format with steplike cuts prevents the book from leafing it through, easing orientation and stressing the thematic differences between subsequent editions. It stimulates the reader to look for the densely scattered pleasures on his own initiative.

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