UTOPIA NON PLACE
CRACOW
17.06.2020 - 17.08.2020
The UTOPIA.NIE-MIEJSCE project is related to the idea of creative dialogue between artistic communities from Poland and Germany. It assumes the presentation of works of painting, sculpture, photography, video and installation. The project promotes the activities of professors, doctoral students, students, but also young, unknown artists and helps to introduce them into the space of international artistic contacts, confronting their work with the recognized artistic and didactic environment of art schools in Poland and Germany.
This year's project is dedicated to Stanislaw Lem. A leading representative of Polish science fiction, philosopher, futurologist and essayist, his works also include realistic novels and satirical texts. His works touch on such topics as the development of science and technology, human nature, the possibility of communication between intelligent beings or the place of man in the Universe. Lem's works contain references to the state of modern society, scientific and philosophical reflections on it, as well as criticism of both the socialist system and Western capitalism. The term we refer to when inviting Polish and German artists is UTOPIA. UNTOPIA.
Utopia is essential to man as a goal never to be realized, a dream and a promise. Therefore, even in times as anti-utopian as today, in a world that has not yet risen from the ruins after the Tower of Babel, utopia squeezes in wherever human fear and human hope are present, and yet these siblings are usually inseparable. As the rubble grows more overgrown with the weeds of oblivion, we will see flocks of false prophets carrying false answers to that true fear and that true hope.
A world without utopia rocks, but what is utopia a guarantor of? This is an irresolvable contradiction. What to hold on to? How to sail between the Scylla of the "wonderful new world" and the Charybdis of stoniness for lack of hope?
Curator:
Michał Sroka, Kamil Kuzko
Artists:
Zbigniew Bajek, Andrzej Bednarczyk, Michalina Bigaj, Bartek Czarnecki, Artur Kapturski, Emilia Kina, Wojciech Kopeć, Piotr Korzeniowski, Kamil Kuzko, Dariusz Milczarek, Kaja Mucha, Jakub Najbart, Jan Podgórski, Filip Rybkowski, Justyna Smoleń, Michał Sroka, Witold Stelmachniewicz, Michał Stonawski, Radek Szlęzak, Jan Tutaj, Bartłomiej Węgrzyn, Wojtek Wasilewski, Michał Zawada, Ulrike Beckmann, Inken Boje, C.U.Frank, Klaus U. Hilsbecher, Lutz Krutein, Edie Kucharzewski, Janusz Radtke, Johannes Raimann, Jurgen Rosner, Detlef Schweiger, Katharina Veerkamp, Andrej Wilhelms.