exhibition of the Master’s Studio, run in 2020 by Joanna Rajkowska

BWA Wrocław Główny Gallery invite to the exhibition Naked Nerve carried out as part of the Master’s Studio conducted in 2020 by Joanna Rajkowska.

The exhibition Naked Nerve is organized within the framework of the Master’s Studio of BWA Wrocław series. The Master’s Studio is a review of the most interesting phenomena in young contemporary art, organized since 2012 by BWA Wrocław. The project is a meeting opportunity for artists who can be safely labelled contemporary classics with those representing the young generation. The formula of the Studio imposes the role of a curator on the master, whose role is first to choose, and then work with the selected artist or artists.

The first Master’s Studio, hosted by Zbigniew Libera, consisted of just a few people, and its diagnosis resonated quite widely among those discussing art in “the times of despair”. It was the time of the final disassembly of the modernity myth and appearance of post-artistic practices, practices questioning the boundaries of materialism and crisis of spirituality. Today, after the seven years that have passed since that exhibition, the artists will tell their stories of the world facing a catastrophe. It is a world transformed by crises, migrations resulting from wars, and economic and political tensions causing them. A world driven to the edge by the vision of a climate disaster requiring worldview reassessments. A world in which humans face a redefinition of their own species, hitherto juxtaposed with the inhuman. Joanna Rajkowska, one of the most widely discussed contemporary artists in Poland these days, has agreed to run the current edition. 

As she formulated the objectives of the project herself, “The Naked Nerve exhibition describes the reality of the second decade of the 21^st century, risking commitment to life, its ephemerality and fragility, its mortality. We want to talk about what is living experience rather than an illustrated assumption. We do not explain, diagnose or apportion blame. We use the materiality of our bodies to survive and record the unique moment and unique situation we want to arrange for the purposes of Naked Nerve. We want to enter the matter of life without armour or safety precautions, the way we are, unarmed”. Rajkowska said it when justifying her choice of participants in the Master’s Studio project. The artist invited an exceptionally large group – as many as eighteen artists whose work penetrates the most painful and problematic areas of our reality in a uniquely defenseless and direct way.  

The format of the Master’s Studio combines the wisdom of a mature generation of renowned artists with the horizon of experience of those who will soon be shaping the future of Polish art. The current stage of the project began where the previous one ended. In the project’s glossary, man is just one more mortal being whose ability to cumulate knowledge and experience confronted with an inevitable disaster – the extinction of species and climate catastrophe – perhaps makes him potentially interesting, but not special, and certainly not dominating. Dealing with the issue of human relationships with other beings, of distinctiveness and dependency, Naked Nerve abandons the western paradigms of rationality. It focuses on matter, both the matter of our bodies, which are part of ecosystems sustaining our life, and the matter of all the beings surrounding us. It is therefore an exhibition of potentialities and weaknesses, frailty, memories of what is immature or overripe, of failure and dependence. And also of relationships and awareness of our place in social systems and ecologies of our Planet. 

The concept of the project allows the talented artists of the young generation representing various techniques and modes of artistic presentation to work under the curatorial supervision of the Master – Joanna Rajkowska, the eminent artist invited to this edition. The qualifying round of the project took place in October 2019 and included public appearances of over a hundred candidates.

Artists: Katka Blajchert, Paweł Błęcki, Pamela Bożek, Marianka Grabska, Katarzyna Hołdys, Jakub Jakubowicz, Kamila Kobierzyńska, Daniel Kotowski, Mateusz Kowalczyk, Kasper Lecnim, Paulina Pankiewicz, Dominika Macocha, Przemek Piniak, Magdalena Romanowska, Irmina Rusicka, Ala Savashevich, Agata Siniarska, Viktoriia Tofan

Master: Joanna Rajkowska

Curator of the galery programme: Anna Mituś

Producer: Patrycja Ścisłowska