exhibition at the Four Domes Pavilion Museum of Contemporary Art

The face – the most recognisable and most exposed, and thus the most vulnerable part of the human body – is the subject of the latest temporary exhibition in the Four Domes Pavilion Museum of Contemporary Art, showcasing works created by nearly twenty artists from around the world. Why, for whom and in what way have people recorded for centuries their own faces and those of others? What threats to one’s own image are posed nowadays by the development of digitalisation, cybernetics and by the indiscriminate use of modern technologies?

The exhibition is centred around the issues most pertinent for the history of the human face: self-identification, portrait, mask and synthetic face. “When progressing through the series of rooms, and viewing the exhibited works of art, visitors will learn about the way in which the status of human image has been changing, and about a growing societal need for its recording” – explains the curator, Iwona D. Bigos. ”Visitors will also be able to follow the evolution of forms of recording that image. After all, the face may be painted, drawn, sculpted, masked, disguised, photographed, touched-up, generated, digital…”.

The exhibits include self-portraits and coffin portraits which glorified the subject’s face. Coffin portraits in the 19th century frequently became purely decorative objects in bourgeois homes, while ritual masks, used for protection and dance, provided both camouflage and a change of identity. Among the exhibited artefacts there are also daguerreotypes – examples of the first commercial photographic technique which revolutionised the way of looking at the world and enabled the precise recording of images. The exhibition also showcases the most recent elements, connected with generating digital and synthetic faces. The variety of viewpoints is truly surprising.

The works opening the exhibition make reference to the myth of Narcissus, the young man admiring his reflexion in the pool of water: a painting from the studio of Jacopo Tintoretto, master of Italian Renaissance, and a conceptual installation entitled “Autoportret 2”[Self-Portrait 2] by Krzysztof Wodiczko, an internationally renowned Polish artist. There is a distance of four hundred years between these works, but when put together they allow us to see diverse contexts of recognising and recording one’s own face.

Among those invited to participate in the exhibition one should note such names as Katarzyna Kozyra, Cindy Sherman and Natalia LL – great modern visual artists. A multichannel video installation ”Faces” created by Kozyra, is one of the central exhibits. Huge screens show recordings of the faces of dancers, expressing extreme emotions, filmed close-up from a distance of less than a metre.

American artist Cindy Sherman is famous for her photographs in which she plays various stereotypical roles; in this case she is dressed as a clown, making ostentatious gestures and poses. In turn, the exhibited masks of Natalia LL belong to the very rarely shown group of her sculptures, referring to the self-image and its reproductions.

A significant part of this exhibition is devoted to digital and synthetic faces based on algorithms and generated via artificial intelligence. This is the turn of those artists who examine in their work the impact of the virtual world on the real one. The issues of subjecting people to constant surveillance, and the risk of losing control over one’s image are addressed by, among others, Dorota Walentynowicz, an artist whose interests are photography and the new media, and James Bridle – artist, technologist and writer, the author of the bestseller “New Dark Age” about technology, politics and society. Both artists wrote the texts for the catalogue which accompanies this exhibition.

”In the era of advanced digitalisation with a growing role of artificial intelligence in public space, where the face has become the most important medium of individual identification, this exhibition encourages reflection on the condition of modern humanity and its dependence on digital technologies” – comments the curator Małgorzata Micuła. ”It also sheds light on the current problems – loss of privacy on the web, activities of artificial intelligence manipulating images, and generating synthetic faces based on the widely accessible private photographs”.

The artists showing in this exhibition include: Zach Blas, James Bridle, Olaf Brzeski, Claude Cahun, Tomasz Dobiszewski, Omer Fast, Weronika Gęsicka, Waldemar Grażewicz, Janes Haid-Schmallenberger, Andrzej Karmasz, Katarzyna Kozyra, Herman Krone, Natalia LL, Stanisław Markowski, Nikodem Nowakowski, Joanna Rajkowska, Cindy Sherman, Katarzyna Szumska, Karolina Szymanowska, Jacopo Tintoretto and studio, Dorota Walentynowicz, Gillian Wearing, Andrzej Wasilewski, Anna and Adam Witkowscy, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Jan Stanisław Wojciechowski, Ksawery Wolski, and some anonymous contributors.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a published catalogue.

More