Mapping out the Contemporary: Twenty years of the Hestia Artistic Journey Competition as the Atlas of Contemporaneity’s Meanders

The exhibition ‘Exuberance. The Atlas of Infinite Possibilities’, held at the Public Art Gallery in Sopot, provides a cross-section of works by the most prominent young artists in Poland, that showcases the development of creative practice in the country throughout the duration of the Hestia Artistic Journey competition.  In 2002, the president of the ERGO Hestia Group initiated an annual competition for students at the art universities in Poland, giving young artists the opportunity to present their creative work to a broader audience, nationally and internationally, as well as make further steps in their artistic careers by participating in prestigious residencies in New York, Milan, or Vilnius. The exhibition is the culmination of the twenty-year-long artistic journey of the competition and its participants.

The opening weekend of the exhibition was accompanied by various educational events, including a sensory tour for seniors, workshops for kids, as well as breathing and yoga workshops held in the gallery space. These demonstrated the increasing accessibility of contemporary art, allowing its encounter with a variety of social groups and its multisensory reception, emphasising the growing sensibility to the need to expand the scope of the experience of art.

‘An atlas is hardly made up of ‘pages’ in the usual sense of the term, but rather of tables or of plates, on which images are arranged, plates that we consult with a particular aim, or that we leaf through at leisure, letting our ‘will to knowledge’ wander from image to image and from place to place’ writes Georges Didi-Huberman. In this dual understanding of what the atlas is, the exhibition provides not only a simple overview of the development of art in Poland through the lens of the competition’s unravelling throughout the years but also an interactive assemblage of subjects and experiences mediated through artistic work, allowing free exploration, further facilitated by the open arrangement of works within the gallery space.  

Entering the main room of the exhibition, the viewer is first struck by a video piece by Xavery Deskur, an artist working primarily with film, using this medium to provoke immersive, destabilising, and sometimes anxiety-inducing responses. ‘Lamella’ (2014), the exhibition’s opening piece, works precisely within this logic. On a big screen hanging down from the ceiling, a close-up recording of a winding, the slimy snail is forced upon the visitors, provoking a simultaneous sensation of fascination and disgust, fostering an aura of otherness and strangeness – an atmosphere particularly stimulating for further artistic explorations within the exhibition space.

Rituals: Persistence of the Esoteric in the Everyday

Smoothly corresponding to the ambience fostered by Deskur, are a few pieces broadly touching upon the ritualistic dimension of our everyday existence. Particularly striking is the piece by Mateusz Kowalczyk, ‘Polish Shaman’ (2019) – a costume comprised of white-red scarfs and elements emblematic to the Polish national identity, enclosed in a glass cabinet, mimicking the representation of pieces in an ethnographic museum. The piece presented at the exhibition, however, functions only as a part of a broad performative project carried out by the artist. Kowalczyk wore the costume on national marches himself and lent it to others, performatively urging for a reinvention and re-engagement with the meaning of Polish patriotism.

Veronika Hapchenko’s, ‘Vessels’ (2021), and Aleksander Sovtysik’s, ‘Hydra2’ (2022) engage with the more esoteric aspects of ritualism. Hapchenko uses painting as a medium to explore the belief in blood transfusion as a means of human rejuvenation, prevalent in Russian cosmism in the XIX and XX centuries, pointing towards the proximity of commonly unacknowledged transhumanistic, esoteric beliefs – temporal as well as physical, if the esoteric is understood as persisting within the physicality of our bodies. Sovtysik, in turn, employs a spatial technique, shaping a carpet’s fabric into a form bearing occultist connotations, thus acknowledging the presence of the esoteric lurking on the margins of the mundane.

The pieces of Marcin Janusz stimulate a parallel reflection on the magic embedded within the most natural domains of reality. In his artistic practice, Janusz, currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Environmental Studies, creates dream-like images, metaphorically representing the condition of human life or the planet, using materials such as glass, sugar, soil, or resin, to foster a symbolic connection between the corporeal and the oneiric dimensions of our existence. The oil and resin painting „Bathing in a Dream Puddle” (2022) and the sculpture „Dream Puddles” (2022) – made from glass and resin – placed opposite each other, do exactly that: the painting facilitates entering a detached, dream-like narrative, while the corresponding sculpture grounds it in reality, confronting the viewer with the materiality of the magical.

The Human/Non-human Condition: Reflections on Political and Environmental Struggles

The exhibition also doesn’t lack more direct, politically pertinent, explorations of environmental issues.  Marcin Grzęda’s installation, „Pandora” (2020) – comprised of a ceramic block held just above the floor by long ropes hanging from the ceiling – alerts us about the instability of the environmental condition our society has found itself in. In the sculpture „The Wounds of the Long Dead Tree” (2022), Norbert Delman uses a careful combination of wood, resin, plastic, and concrete to pose a reflection on the possibility of environmental damnation. Both pieces comment on the complex relationship between human and non-human agents in the contemporary world, highlighting the politically charged character of the tensions resulting from treating the non-human as inferior.

In a more light-hearted manner, a series of untitled photographs by Krzysztof Maniak (2015) focuses instead on the intimate experience of nature and human interaction with the environment, subtly urging for heightened sensitivity and playfulness within these interactions. A similar call echoes in the performative video piece „Being Friendly Again” (2016) by Piotr Urbaniec, perhaps signalling the need to reinvent the practices of the every day to approach the surrounding world with increased care and sincerity.

The most politically salient piece at the exhibition is „25 kadя” (2015) by Katarzyna Kimak, having the strongest impact also due to its presentation within the gallery space. The video, mixing audio accounts of victims and witnesses of the war in Ukraine, supplemented by white subtitles on a pitch-black background, is played in a small, dark, room, limiting access of all other sensory stimuli. The way of presentation intensifies the audio-visual reception of the piece in an almost oppressive manner, stating the necessity to make the voices of the politically marginalised more audible and aiming to shorten the distance between the speakers and the viewer.

Portrait Manipulations: The Contemporary Identity

Reflecting on the complexity of contemporary identity issues, the exhibition tackles the multifaceted theme with an equally elaborate artistic repertoire. Playing with the convention of portrait art and reflecting upon the issue of identity, Józef Gałązka, with „Grandfather Portrait” (2016), tries to capture the figure of his grandfather, for this purpose using both film and sculpture. The plenitude of artistic media employed by the artist reinforces the necessity of a multidimensional representation of an individual, simultaneously emphasising the difficulty of recreating one’s identity by means of ephemeral memory traces, thus echoing the themes of nostalgia, closeness, and loss.

Bożena Wydrowska in „At least I tried” (2021), presents an equally interesting take on the issue of identity, this time focusing on self-representation. The video is a recording of a failed attempt to prepare a performative act during the pandemic, with which the artist explores the difficulty within the means of identity representation in the media, particularly relevant in the times when the social realm has shifted into the virtual sphere.

Cyryl Polaczek presents a slightly more traditional take on the self-portrait form yet manages to question the boundaries between creation and destruction with a smear running through the middle of the painting. ‘Self-portrait’ (2012), Polaczek’s blurry self-representation, likewise points towards the vagueness and indeterminacy inherent to identity issues.

From the volume of exhibited paintings, the one leaving the strongest impression is Ewa Juszkiewicz’s diptych – ‘Swimmers’ (2009). Juszkiewicz uses the technique of modern Flemish painters yet manipulates the traditional forms to break with the conventional means of female representations in portrait art. The facial distortions – bordering on mutilations – applied to the seemingly traditional representation of swimmer figures in the painting yield an aura of eeriness and provoke discomfort, thus questioning conventions of beauty and pushing the boundaries of pleasure in the traditional aesthetic experience.

Positioning Art: Perspectives for the Future

The positive overtones echoing from the exhibition’s title might be true concerning the potentialities of the artistic realm: the abundance of media and techniques employed to grasp various aspects of the social, environmental, political, and spiritual realms from multiple perspectives, reveals the growing sensitivity of contemporary art to issues pertinent to our existence. The success of the Hestia Artistic Journey competition can therefore be observed in the twenty-year-long, artistic infiltration of these gravity fields of contemporary life, setting up and grounding the directions for contemporary art.

However, it is precisely this art’s promising potentiality that forces a reflection on the bleak potentialities of the contemporary world. The eponymous atlas isn’t only designed for escapist purposes of detachment, but rather anchors the viewer deeper within the reality of the contemporary world – and perhaps sometimes urges for an intervention amidst the lurking threats and anxieties.