Friday,
26 April
The exhibition is about a meeting with the Other, a meeting with His presence and absence. Recalling the drama unfolding on the borders of Europe, the drama of emigrants forced to leave their families, homes, homelands, the exhibition shows us our anxieties and walls, fences and borders that grow out of these anxieties. These boundaries, which we create, erect, run not only through continents, countries, and the space that surrounds us. These boundaries run through ourselves. And the meeting with the Other allows us to know ourselves. Recalling the topos of travel, flight, return, border crossing, in the context of life and death of specific people shows the drama and irreversibility of the choices we make.
The inspiration for the creation of Damian Wiśniewski’s work was a list of people who died during their emigration to Europe, The List of Death, announced by United for Intercultural Action in Amsterdam. This list was created in 2006 and to this day is updated by a collective consisting of curators, art workers and non-governmental institutions.
The symbol of the border is the fence set up in the Gallery, alien to this space. On the one hand, it shows the absurdity, artificiality of every wall in every place, and on the other hand, through direct confrontation with such an obstacle, it allows us, visitors to the exhibition, to feel in a tangible way the alienation, helplessness and fear caused by such a situation. The fence is the central element of the exhibition, dividing it into two spaces. The transition between them is deliberately narrow and tight. If two people meet in this passage, one of them has to withdraw, step back, perform a specific gesture of invitation and acceptance, so that the other person can continue the visit or return from this part of the exhibition, from which there is no other way out.
Let us look at ourselves through this fence, let us feel this border, usually invisible, which separates us. Let us see how we cease to be a whole, how we become fragmented, because every impassable boundary, separating us from other people, separates us from ourselves.
You are invited to attend the exhibition
Jarek Rusiński – Exhibition curator
Damian Wiśniewski (born 1989 in Gostyń) student of the fifth year of photography at the Faculty of Media Art at the University of Arts in Poznań. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree from the Faculty of Landscape Design at the Bionics Department of the same university with the thesis titled: “Removed from reality. An attempt to change the perception of space.”
Group exhibitions:
2018 – Poznań art week “Non-pluperfect tense” – LUKA Gallery in Poznań
2017 – “Constellations” – Opaliński Castle in Sieraków
2017 – “Astronomer’s Dream” – Astronomical Scientific Circle of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań
2017 – “Observatory” – Gallery R20 in Poznan
Individual exhibitions:
2018 – “visibility of the invisible” VA Gallery in Poznan