July 16 – August 31
Our perception—of the world and of ourselves—is constantly exposed to threats. It becomes blurred under the impact of the ever-present visual stimuli, fumbles in a thicket of the semi-true and false images created by the media, falters under the pressure of the visual persuasion exercised by political marketing, and faces the images produced by a lacerated memory and unhealed psychological trauma.
Artists: Tadeusz Kantor and Alexandra Bachzetsis, Aneta Grzeszykowska, Marysia Lewandowska, Nikita Kadan, Goshka Macuga, the “List” 2020 collective, Christoph Schlingensief, Gisèle Vienne.
The Kantor. Vision Therapy exhibition makes it possible for us to see a response to this state of threat in Tadeusz Kantor’s works. It is not another exhibition on Kantor, but an “optical instrument” constructed using his works and the contemporary artistic interventions. An instrument that may help to sharpen our cloudy vision.
War, both the one from 80 years ago and the one waged across our eastern border; a past that presses heavily on us and a future that becomes a hammer used against ideological enemies; dehumanization and the dangers resulting from making man the measure of all things; identity as a mask you can safely hide behind and as a ballast that you cannot untie yourself from… The optical instrument makes us look towards those areas of reality that we normally glance over or that we look at with indifference, numbed by the visual overload.
The exhibition comprises six kaleidoscopic constellations: I is Someone Else, This Uncanny Everyday, Human Things, In the Shadow of a Catastrophe, Art is the Only Revolutionary Power, and Oblivion. Each of them refers to the themes present in Kantor’s works, at the same time attempting to harmonize with the experiences of a contemporary spectator. Their composition is not governed by chronology or similarities in terms of genres or formal aspects. Painting, drawing, elements of stage design, photos from performances and happenings, videos, and archive materials form temporary arrangements like in a kaleidoscope, mix with the works of other artists, and their sole purpose is to snap our vision from a state of numbness.
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Tadeusz Kantor, Children in a Garbage Cart, 1961, courtesy of Cricoteca. -
Aneta Grzeszykowska, from the series MAMA, no. 44, 2018 Courtesy of the Cricoteca. -
Letter 2020, a frame from a film by Magda Mosiewicz. Courtesy of the Cricoteca. -
Tadeusz Kantor, 1 Pacific, oil on canvas, 1957. lodz, private collection. Courtesy of the Cricoteca. -
Tadeusz Kantor, I’ll Never Come Back Here Again, photo by Guntner Kuhnel, 1988; Courtesy of the Cricoteca.
