The 12th Biennale of Student Graphic Arts is a competition concluded with an exhibition and addressed to students of universities and art institutes. The organiser of the biennale is the Department of Graphic Arts of the Magdalena Abakanowicz University of Arts in Poznań in cooperation with the Arsenał Municipal Gallery. This year’s post-competition exhibition features 46 out of about 1,000 submitted graphic works.
The biennale is dedicated to graphic arts – ‘The area of graphic arts involves all forms of printing (such as offset, photocopying and digital printing), including classic graphic techniques (such as woodcut, linocut, lithography, metal techniques and serigraphy), as well as activities performed using modern information media (such as press, books, internet, television and external screens). It includes artistic activity related to the use of graphic language – simplifications, synthesis, condensation and visual communication (accepted and commonly understood visual content) – aimed at creating new forms of creative expression. Hence, graphic arts include interventions in urban space, artnet, templates, collage techniques, archival records, graphic installations, actions on billboards, murals, comments on existing information carriers, leaflets, original posters, as well as graphic works on paper or canvas and on other surfaces’.
The post-competition exhibition is entitled Przeciwciała [Antibodies]. The tile is taken from medical terminology. In the context of art and social relations, it refers to values influencing changes in the ways of thinking and producing cultural patterns. It is connected with an attempt to search for alternative solutions exposing system errors and leading to their correction. The title of the exhibition provokes a discussion about a network of relations focused on the acceptance of conflict situations in order to find solutions that take account of various social interests. The dialogue on this subject is based on the idea of agonistic pluralism, taking into account the variety of attitudes opposing standardisation, typification and massification. It contributes to the acceptance of excluded social groups that perversely affect the proper operation of the social system. The complexity of social organisation, in a broader context, reveals the operation of global mechanisms that create social polarisation. By pointing to phenomena that do not meet the standards imposed by contemporary consumer culture, it is possible to undermine the value of art that focuses on objects. Forms of creative expression that fit into the current language of media communication make it possible to suspend the process of reifying art.
The post-competition exhibition of the 12th Biennale of Student Graphic Arts features young artists’ works which, through their subversive nature, show contemporary interpersonal relations in the social structure. These relations are no longer founded on trade-based contacts, but on considerations related to an unusual way of perceiving reality.