Adhesion
Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice, Rondo Sztuki May 21 - July 21, 2024
Participants: Richard Long, Iza Tarasewicz, Alicja Bielawska, Maria Stokłosa, Cecylia Malik, Saša Spačal, Petra Janda, Isolde Venrooy, Sylvia Noronha, Michał Smandek, Agnieszka Brzeżańska, Justyna Mędrala, Jakub Stelmach, Grzegorz Hańderek and Mikołaj Szpaczyński
Exhibition titled “Adhesion” was created with reference to the activities of Richard Long, for whom the experience of being rooted in the landscape and becoming familiar with it through external applications is crucial. Walking as a tool, technique and creative method has a risky potential that has become an impulse to create an archive of other uses in the field and the meanings associated with them.
Invited artists perform a biopsy of the area. They use the matter of the ground as a medium, functioning on the principles of an archive in which there are individual records that are processed, not only natural, but also cultural. In this context, terrain stratigraphy is described as a repository of coded texts containing individual and generational signs of biography.
This spectral geology as a method of research on time is freed from the shackles of methodology typical of this field of science and turns out to be a laboratory of metaphors, especially useful from the perspective of environmental reflection. Close neighborhoods and close relationships, conglomerates and condensations turn out to be new foundations for thinking about reality through the prism of the concept of flow, exchange and symbiosis.
They are ways of alleviating the anxieties of the end of the human age. Instead of the belief in the super-agency of homo sapiens based on control and distance, they bring a vision of harmonious consonance in which it is possible to find a common rhythm. Its healing power is based on a set of movements inspired by the dynamics of weaving and adhesion, which constitute an archive of choreography of constantly circulating matter. The pursuit of clear divisions is replaced here by the overarching rule of permeation. It is a song written for many voices, a symphony of connections as a form of dark ecology with the category of stickiness inscribed in it, in which each entity, if it is justified to use the concept of an individual, turns out to be glued to others with a set of tendrils, tentacles and suction cups.
Curator: Marta Lisok