SLALOM

SLALOM

Gallery Duza Scena UAP, 24 Wodna Str.
Opening: 02.08.2024, 18:00
Duration of exhibition: 02-20.08.2024

Participants: Krzysztof Balcerowiak, Wojciech Dada, Rafał Jakubowicz, Dorota Jonkajtis, Paweł Kaszczyński, Aleksandra Kosior, Sebastian Trzoska, Radosław Włodarski

Imagination and imaging – Slalom, i.e. a spontaneous collection of thoughts, quotes, ideas and things.

Wordplay – cheap or not? It depends on what the play is about.

Stanisław Jerzy Lec

Compared to other alpine skiing disciplines, slalom is held on the shortest route with the proportionally greatest number of changes in directions. Additionally, the competition itself consists of two runs on two different routes marked with characteristic poles, and only the summed result of these runs is the final result of a given competitor in this discipline. But apart from the very nature of sports performances (which are worthy of the highest admiration) and fan involvement, which for many people is the basis of self-identity of being in the world, slalom as a kind of theoretical figure (built over decades by the strength of athletes’ muscles and powdered snow on the sharpest bends of Alpine routes) has the potential to connect the most distant and extremely individual artistic strategies and artistic objects resulting from these strategies. Or at least that’s what we found as a one-time collection of individual practitioners who came together a bit ad hoc, but when the opportunity arises, we strike while the iron is hot.

As individuals who have built a significant part of their identity from artistic practice, we actually try to ask about other objects (in the broadest sense of the word) through specific objects. What others will do with it is not up to us. However, the reason for our actions is most often a feeling of unspecified compulsion, which was sown in our heads by an insistent, but at the same time surprisingly fleeting impression. It could be called an internal compulsion to materialize ephemeral ideas that even demand from us their realization and independent existence. It’s hard to say whether we have anything to say on this matter. We are rather interested in things, how they are made, from what and whether we managed to build them in such a way that they convey content. What happens to them next is beyond any individual’s control (for the better or for the worse).

The title slalom refers rather to the space between – between individual works, between the space of everyday life and a prepared artistic fact, between reality and feeling, between object and meaning, exhibition and viewer. It is something like an organic vector that cannot be captured. We can only observe the proverbial poles that mark its route and the ruts that are piling up. The momentum of this movement is independent; just as an unexpected thought can arise between an experience and a feeling, in the same way the sensation of free movement emerges from among the concrete things.

The reason for this exhibition (and this text) is an attempt to create a situation of dialogue; a spontaneous desire to talk between people for whom creative activity is really a form of communication that may (but does not have to) turn into a free conversation and then into a creative dialogue based on mutual exchange. Salom is really a side effect of this process. We can only try to keep our balance on the sharpest corners.