STAH BAŁDYGA
Student of the Faculty of Sculpture of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Creates installations (often kinetic), objects, performances, street art and comic strips. A major part of his work consists in creating and introducing art in public space. Bałdyga’s investigations concern such problems as process, change, temporariness, various forms of decay and instability. Process is both his working method and an end in itself. The artist uses simple natural sources of energy, which he calls natural engines, such as: wind, water current, gravitation. Other aspects of his experiments are tension, critical point, duality and its internal conflict, contradiction. His performances deliver commentaries on the current political and social problems, such as war, zone of influence, migration crisis, human condition in the technological reality. His most recent exhibitions include “ŻEŹBA”, Warsaw, 2016; “OPWA”, Orońsko, 2016; “Vane Gallery Performance Event”, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2017; “Beyond Symposium and ‘Being in Public’ event”, Belfast, 2017. The exhibition features his film “Wizard from Flying Mountain” from 2015.
GOSIA BARTOSIK
Active in the fields of painting, drawing and graphic art. Graduate of the Faculty of Painting and Graphic at the University of the Arts in Poznań. Bartosik has presented her works at individual exhibitions, such as “I Woke up an Adult”, CK ZAMEK, Poznań, 2017; “Culture of Free Bodies”, V9 Gallery, Warsaw, 2012, and several group shows, such as “Unintentionally”, BWA, Zielona Góra, 2015; “Devil’s Ass”, V9 Gallery, Warsaw, 2015, amongst other exhibitions. She also contributes to zins and street paintings. Her art delivers a critical commentary on the sensitivity and insensitivity of the human being. The artist concentrates on the human condition and draws attention to polemical actions with regard to the world, animals and, above all, to another person, without losing hope in her search for the good. The exhibition features her work “Ms. Sunshine” from 2017.
BARBARA CHĘCKA /1938–2001/
Chęcka lived in Płock until the age of 24. After a failed suicide attempt, she was hospitalised at a psychiatric ward. The artist spent the majority of her life in psychiatric hospitals and the care centre in Zakrzewo. Her creative work was stimulated by plein air meetings within the action “This is Me” /1997–2000/,
organised yearly in Zakrzewo near Płock. The majority of works by Barbara Chęcka are letters that she used to “send” by throwing them to the rubbish bin. Apart from letters, she also created symbolic works on canvas, in which words complement a visual message related to love, home, travelling. The texts revolve around the enigmatic figure of a lover – Jasiek Potocki, often revealing the transsexuality of language. The works function as manifestations of feelings and bear a philosophical imprint of existence, as exemplified by the text “They Went to Bring Fire” presented at the exhibition.
DIANA GRABOWSKA
Graduate of the Faculty of Sculpture of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Her artistic practice is situated in the expanded field of sculpture. The artist works on the borderland of several artistic disciplines: traditional sculpture/sculptural object, video art, design and performative activities. Participant in group exhibitions in Poland – in Warsaw, Poznań, Lublin, Szczecin, Bydgoszcz and Kielce, amongst other cities – as well as in Greece and the USA.
Holder of the “Young Poland” scholarship of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage. Shortlisted in the competitions “Breathtaking” and “(NIE)obecność”. Awarded the main awards in “Coming Out – The Best Diplomas of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and in the ENTRY Initiative, the “Golden Chisel” Award and the award of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage for best students. Holder of a scholarship of the Rector of the Academy of Fine Arts for best students and the Scholarship of the Minister of Science and Higher Education for outstanding achievements. The exhibition features her work titled “Purification” in the first edition in 2013. In 2017, the work adopted the form of postcards with a music box.
Commentary to the work:
D.Ż.: Can’t do it with soap!
D.G.: Depends on whether it’s bar or liquid!
WŁADYSŁAW GRYGNY
Lives and works in Chorzów. Graduate of a technical secondary school for miners. Worked as an electrician-technician at the “Kleofas” mine in Katowice. Grygny began studies at the Academy of Economics in Katowice, but did not graduate. For a certain period, his occupation involved touring with famous music bands, Niebiesko-Czarni and Trubadurzy, to provide soundman’s assistance and photographic documentation of performances. Grygny established a family, but his mental illness paved the way for its collapse. Thenceforth, the artist has been living a life of solitude. In the 1980s, he began bringing his works to the Ethnographic Museum in Cracow, abandoning the paintings with an attached train ticket from Chorzów to Cracow, and leaving without talking to the museum employees. Grygny records his thoughts about the world in the form of letters that adopt the form of a commentary, play on words or a kind of manifesto. Text is often inscribed within the shape of the human head. His letters also incorporate found elements, fragments of envelopes, old papers. Each of the letters bears an attached stamp and a seal of the post office in Chorzów. The exhibition features the artist’s “Notebooks.”
John Urho Kemp (1942-2010), known to some as Crystal John
Kemp graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1965 with a degree in chemical engineering and biochemistry. He worked as a chemical engineer for almost two years, then quit to study Scientology in England and Los Angeles until 1971. He spent the next decade operating an antiques business in Los Angeles. Amongst other interests, he traveled the world to witness solar eclipses and frequented hot springs of Northern California. Throughout his life he sought revelations through meditation, metaphysics, formulas, and numbers, recorded primarily in pencil and pen on the blank surfaces of scrap papers. Much of his work was refined and compiled into compact documents that were then photocopied and leafleted as a means of sharing his findings with as many people as he could. The exhibition features an endless collection of Kemp’s formula’s from the archive of Aram Muksian.
KAMIL KURZAWA
Lives and works in Wrocław. The exhibition features the artist’s “Notebook”, an object akin to a comic strip which gathers a collection of multiplications of superhero evolutionary forms: cells, chiefs, vehicle rulers, warriors. Each figure is analysed in great detail. The artist notes down all predispositions of a given superhero, such as size, potential and type of development, colour, armour, power. These parameters form the core of a given figure’s “profile,” which also features attached visualisations and drawings of their subsequent metamorphoses. When unfolded, the list of “qualities” of each figure measures up to 1.5 metre. The “Notebook” thus becomes an extraordinary living organism. The artist also creates animations from the series “The Weirdest Show Ever” (TWSE), in which he directs fantastic missions of protagonists of television series, comic strips, manga: minotaurs, kings, defenders, invaders, such as figures from Power Rangers, Star Wars, Dragon Ball, Baldur’s Gate and Shaman King, amongst other productions. The plot is sometimes shifted from the fantasy world to the reality of the city of Wrocław.
IWONA MYSERA
Lives and works in Płock. Mysera creates written records in her own language on individual paper sheets, in notebooks, calendars and on world maps. Her artistic activity was initially kept secret. During that period, everyone in the artist’s family saw their paper sheets and notebooks disappear. A prominent motif in her work is the letter A, which opens nearly all white sheet spaces, complemented by a numeral system comprising digits (mostly 1 3, 5), inscribed in a system of columns and rows. The notebooks sometimes incorporate photographs of idols, TV series actors and singers, cut out from newspapers. The cut-outs pasted into a notebook are sometimes removed, leaving a trace inside. For Mysera, her works have the qualities of a direct act, a document. They provide a record of the most intimate thoughts. The artist discards most of her secret projects. Presented at the exhibition is her work “Calendar” with
a world map covered with the artist’s writings.
PAWEŁ MYSERA
Visual artist, graduate and employee of the Faculty of Sculpture of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Cerates objects, installations and video works. Mysera’s projects are records of ephemeral natural phenomena and hidden spaces related to human nature. They address the problematic of existence, society, religion and politics. The artist expresses his dissent to the world’s status quo. He has presented his works at the exhibition “Kowalski’s Smithy”, BWA, Katowice, 2015; “Golden Section”, gallery of the Sztuczna Foundation, Warszawa, 2016; “ŻEŹBA”, Warsaw, 2016; “Black Ensign”, Tak Gallery, Poznań, 2016, amongst other shows. The exhibition “Bermuda Triangle” includes his work “Saydnaya” from 2017, which is devoted to a prison of Bashar al-Assad’s regime located near the city of Saydnaya. Using a satellite photograph, Mysera attempts to symbolically reconstruct the place where thousands of victims of the civil war in Syria lost their lives.
RADOSŁAW PERLAK
Born in Poznań, works at the Rawicz Prison. Ran away from home at the age of seventeen and served in the French Foreign Legion for two years. Since 1999, Perlak has served a life imprisonment sentence at the Rawicz Prison, where he completed his secondary education within an extramural scheme and wrote three books. The latest, Wszyscy możemy być więźniami (We can all be prisoners, 2015) pursues a critique of the Polish prison system. The artist started painting in 2011. He has never completed any courses nor an art school. He explains: “If I can, I want to paint until the end of my life. Art is the only thing that will be left after me and after us.” Apart from polishing his painting workshop, an equally important aspect of his work consists in the message of his paintings, elaborated in the accompanying texts. The exhibition features the artist’s painting “Eyes” and the object “Dog in Jars”.