Artists: Sławomir “Zbiok” Czajkowski, Stanisław Legus, Stach Szumski, Janek Zamoyski, Nampei Akaki, Bao Ting, Johann Winkelmann, Vova Vorotniov.
“BARKIN / 感 度” is already the second exhibition of Czułość. Czułość (jap.感 度) began its activity in the Polish underground in 2010, with time becoming an independent culture-forming international platform. The activities of the group, which today include artists from China, Japan, Germany, Poland and Ukraine, are characterized by independence from the academic and institutional cultural system. They focus their activities on bottom-up cultural organization, create an international network of contacts, function as NGO, and as a gallery operating on the art market. The exhibition will show you the latest works by eight artists cooperating with the group.
In the W+K+ Gallery in Tokyo, artists from Czułość will make a visual analysis of the interface between photography and graphite, two fields of art and two of the most popular creative communication media in the world today. “Slightly simplifying, I understand graffiti as a form of marking one’s presence in a common space, it is a grassroots manifestation of pluralism and a kind of anarchist opposition to the bourgeois hierarchy. Graffiti is like barking dogs at night, which in this way inform about their presence. Our exhibition could be just such a sign of our presence, as a group, a simple information that we exist. Informing about your existence is not that trivial and symbolizes self-awareness and the basic form of self-determination and openness to communicate with others. That is why I am tempted not to strain ourselves on any other meanings of our exhibition, and even strive for the idea of an elusive interpretation, a transparent art functioning only as a barking and as its independent sound. The photography can be like that if you get rid of the symbolism and the author’s thought interpretation and use the greatest value of this tool – a robotic programmation to faithfully record reality. And such can be the graffiti, which, in addition to marking the area, still has some kind of tribute in itself or it is a medium to some independently existing values.” – Janek Zamoyski, founder of Czułość.
Funded by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of Poland under the Multiannual Program INDEPENDENT 2017-2022, as part of the grant program of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute “Cultural Bridges”