How can visual art and contemporary philosophical reflection meet? What correspondence between these humanities will not be some form of illustrating philosophy? The Philosopher’s Room exhibition assertively touches on this question by creating an imaginative sphere inspired by Jean-François Lyotard’s essay “Clouds”. It draws on the scientific competence of Ewa Bobrowska, both a contemporary artist and a philosopher, author of a Polish translation of the essay, as well as theoretical publications and anthologies of philosophical texts.
The artist has transposed the narrative structure of Lyotard’s “Clouds” (published in 1988), combining threads from seemingly unrelated areas into the exhibition space modelled on the environment. This allows one to explore all exhibition elements in any order and create one’s own narratives. Meanwhile, the visual motif of cloud photography, unconventional lighting, and sound imbue the whole space with a oneiric character. As a result, The Philosopher’s Room creates the impression of a space for thinking, which often takes place in regions of the personality that are also strongly activated during sleep.
While The Philosopher’s Room envisions a space for thinking, it does not aim to recreate a specific room; instead, it is a visual metaphor for the place where a philosopher lives, rests, sleeps, and works, and is, therefore, not just a philosopher’s office.
Thoughts are like clouds. They don’t really have mental roots; they feed only on the attention we give them. And yet, when an exceptional person engages with them, important hypotheses emerge that renew questions about the meaning of existence and temporality. While The Philosopher’s Room envisions a space for thinking, it does not aim to recreate a specific room; instead, it is a visual metaphor for the place where a philosopher lives, rests, sleeps, and works, and is, therefore, not just a philosopher’s office. It also signals visual inspirations, stages of intellectual work, and a kind of imprisonment in one’s own persuasions, worldview, conceptual grid, and mode of reflection. Affirming intellectual work, it also metaphorically points out the ambivalences associated with it – limitations, perhaps stemming from the philosopher’s biography, as well as his male point of view.
There are more ambivalences and oscillations at the limits of concepts’ and images’ meanings in The Philosopher’s Room. This site’s space is marked by objects and images of heterogeneous status.
Ewa Bobrowska’s film The Penetration of Clouds of Thought (2024), reproduced in a cyclical loop, is composed of animated photographs of clouds and fragments of the author’s film Sketching, a cinematic documentation of action in the space of nature. The montage of the film shows nature as a construct of images and thinking–nature merged with elements of culture, so it is a construct close to what is referred to as “naturoculture”. This term refers to the products of human creativity made in such synergy with nature that the two become inseparable. Thus, we can say that the film is structured as a naturocultural narrative in which images of nature are not only the visual material used but also the inspiration for that narrative. The projection of The Penetration of Clouds of Thought takes place simultaneously on two media: a vertical rectangle on the gallery wall and a horizontal rectangle on a laptop (placed on an end table). In this way, the video appears as a kind of public presentation of the philosopher’s reflections (on the wall) and as material that the philosopher is working on (on the laptop). The vertical-horizontal opposition translates into a public-private opposition.
In contrast, the signs of privacy present in the exhibition are no longer images but material objects. The Philosopher’s Bed suggests the existential presence of a person, while The Column practically radiates the very personality and the complexity of its influence. The Column is one of the light sources: it contains a simple mechanism that causes its rhythmic, though not entirely uniform, vibration. The meaning of this object includes the realms of death, dream-fiction, libidinal energy, and “real” experience in the Freudian sense. And remembering that the figure of the column builds the chapter The Colossal from Jacques Derrida’s “The Truth in Painting” (1978) – where it is a figure of art and of the sublime that transcends comprehension – it already escapes recognition as a sign of mere privacy. Integrating The Column and The Philosopher’s Bed into nearly one object brings not only the vibration of light but also the vibration of the meanings of these objects.
The distinction between the status of image and object does not fully surrender to The Ontological Landscape, a large-format black-and-white photograph on film hung on a wall illuminated by fluorescent lights. The picture, taken by the artist, depicts a desert landscape from the vicinity of Irvine, where J.-F. Lyotard wrote his lectures, including the essay “Clouds” that opens this series. The visual structure of the photograph potentially corresponds to the thought structure of a person working intellectually. At the same time, the photographic medium used – the large-format film that does not adhere smoothly to the wall and is illuminated from below, revealing its materiality – is not only an image of a fragment of nature but, in a visible way, also a thing, a material object. It signals and makes nature present as a material entity of a different kind than human, a non-human entity. A non-human entity constitutes a material frame for all human activity, including intellectual research.
The View from the Window introduces a different kind of experience. It’s a short video, recorded by Ewa Bobrowska, showing an authentic view from the window of J.-F. Lyotard’s room, where the philosopher lived during his stay at the University of California (the text “Clouds” was probably written in this room). The dazzling blue of the cloudless California sky suggests that the philosopher took his images of swirling clouds from European landscapes and brought them to the Pacific coast as continually inspiring personal baggage.
Although it is a statement marked by the imagination of a female artist and philosopher, it does not draw on the familiar idioms of “female sensibility”; instead, it discreetly plays and polemicises with them.
The physical and meaningful space of the entire exhibition is complemented by The Philosopher’s Notes – drawings and prints by Ewa Bobrowska. Some are arranged on the philosopher’s bed and the end table with a laptop; others hang on the wall. Most of these notes are asemic; they do not contain letters but characters that resemble them. The artist’s abstract notations, which signify different modes of expression, do not simulate the notes of a particular philosopher; they materialise the process of intellectual work itself. This work becomes present through references to concepts, distinctions, oppositions, or ambivalences in the making, inspired by both philosophers’ texts and the artist’s reflection. They remain open to various interpretations, confident that viewers will find signs that speak to their intuition. The status of The Philosopher’s Notes is twofold: they are an integral component of the entire exhibition while retaining significant autonomy as independent artefacts. In both cases, although in different ways, they undoubtedly correspond to both art and philosophy. They also refer to heuristics, the science of making discoveries, and lead to the humanities in the broadest sense. This is a key vector of the exhibition, combining various artistic media (spatial objects, photographs, three film projections in different formulas, drawings, graphics, paintings, unconventional lighting, and sound) into an integral, sensory-conceptual whole.
Conceived and executed in this way, The Philosopher’s Room also enters into a dialogue with the history of the Foksal Gallery in the first decades of its activity, when the relationship between art and intellectual research was an essential feature of the gallery’s program. The exhibition continues this theme in a different, suggestive way that touches the senses. Although it is a statement marked by the imagination of a female artist and philosopher, it does not draw on the familiar idioms of “female sensibility”; instead, it discreetly plays and polemicises with them. Ewa Bobrowska follows a separate path. Synthetically, it can be defined as follows: what is conceptual in philosophical discourse, the artist transforms into sensual perceptibility, subject to direct and varied experience. The conceptual becomes realised here as an object or image. Note that even the colloquial term “to make sense” leads to the meaning “to realise something” – to place in one’s reality, to make it real. This is a unique quality of this art.
Ewa Bobrowska’s The Philosopher’s Room, curated by Grzegorz Borkowski, was on view between February 2 and March 3, 2025, at Galeria Foksal in Warsaw.
Written by Grzegorz Borkowski
Translated by Katarzyna Szuster-Tardi
Ewa Bobrowska – visual artist, aesthetician, philosopher. She holds a PhD in Fine Arts from the University of Arts in Poznań and a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Warsaw. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California. She works on artistic creation and analysis of contemporary philosophical reflection. She works as an assistant professor at the Faculty of Media Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, where since 2013 she has been collaborating with prof. Krzysztof Wodiczko, co-running the artistic Studio of Public Domain Art, and also conducting theoretical seminars. Her artistic works have been exhibited, among others, at: Zachęta, CSW in Warsaw, Trafo in Szczecin, Salon Akademii, Muzeum Mazowieckie, Akademickie Centrum Designu in Łódź, Fordham University in New York, University of California in Irvine, Muzeum Sztuki in Castello and Nova Sin Gallery in Prague. She is also the author of the books “Parateoria. The California Irvine School” and “UCI Critical Theory and Contemporary Art Practice: Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Bruce Nauman, and Others” and editor of the anthology “California Critical theory. An Anthology of Translations”.
