PROCEDURES FOR THE HEAD: Polish Art Today

Exhibited Artists: Paweł Althamer & Paulina Antoniewicz & Jacek Taszakowski, Ewa Axelrad, Mirosław Bałka, Wojciech Bąkowski, Piotr Bosacki, Paweł Bownik, Olaf Brzeski, Rafał Bujnowski, Oskar Dawicki, Wojciech Doroszuk, Nicolas Grospierre, Aneta Grzeszykowska, Jan Smaga, Łukasz Jastrubczak, Ewa Juszkiewicz, Magdalena Karpińska, Tomasz Kowalski, Agnieszka Kurant, Milena Korolczuk, Zbigniew Libera, Goshka Macuga, Marcin Maciejowski, Honorata Martin, Krzysztof Mężyk, Gizela Mickiewicz, Katarzyna Mirczak, Anna Molska, Mikołaj Moskal, Witek Orski, Sławomir Pawszak, Agnieszka Piksa, Agnieszka Polska, Katarzyna Przezwańska, Wojciech Puś, Karol Radziszewski, Joanna Rajkowska, Bianka Rolando, Wilhelm Sasnal, Maciej Sieńczyk, Janek Simon, Slavs and Tatars, Łukasz Surowiec, Monika Szwed, Iza Tarasewicz, Mariusz Tarkawian, Aleksandra Waliszewska, Jakub Woynarowski, Jakub Julian Ziółkowski, Anna Zaradny, Artur Żmijewski
 

Procedures for the Head. Polish Art Today is a sequel of the exhibition As You Can See presented at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2014). This exhibition was the first such extensive presentation of contemporary Polish art in more than a decade. Featuring more than 80 artists representing different generations, media and art centers, focus was attributed to the most important work, approaches and themes employed by artists. Sebastian Cichocki and Łukasz Ronduda, the exhibition’s curators, intentionally chose the conservative exhibition format of the art salon in an attempt to shift attention from curatorial experimentation to the works of art themselves. However, it was a rather unusual salon — critical, emancipatory, psychedelic, often brutal, perverse, self-confident and ambiguous. 

The title of the exhibition is inspired by the series of artistic performances in the 1970s authored by the radical neo-avant-garde duo KwieKulik (Zofia Kulik and Przemysław Kwiek). During these performances, the artists created works of art on various heads: their own, the heads of models, as well as the heads of other artists. The duo KwieKulik pointed to elements of the game, process, connections between the audience and the artists and material characteristic of the new art.
 

The exhibition Procedures for the head. Polish Art Today is a showcase not only of the methods of modeling the world through art, but also of understanding and imagining an alternative reality by building a relationship between the past and an anticipated future.  The exhibition in Bratislava is based on a more intuitive formal relationship between the chosen works, whilst also focusing on the dark, imaginative element in contemporary Polish art.

                                                                                                                                                                                     

Sebastian Cichocki

Curator of the exhibition

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Photo credits: Juraj Bartoš (opening), Martin Marinčin (výstava)