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22/10/2009

Two exhibitions

Centre of Contemporary Art Znaki Czasu - CoCA, Torun

Factory
Mariusz Waras (M-city) / Krzysztof Topolski (Arszyn)
curated by Daniel Muzyczuk

The collaboration of a visual artist and an experimental musician has resulted in a most interesting and thought-provoking artistic project. Mariusz Waras and Krzysztof Topolski’s spectacular site-specific installation was made specifically to be exhibited in the biggest room at the Centre of Contemporary Art Znaki Czasu in Toruń.

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.
Bob Black, The Abolition of Work

For both artists, working on the project was a novelty. Mariusz Waras, an artist who has so far found artistic expression in two-dimensional murals, now constructs a huge, three-dimensional object; Arszyn supplies it with a special interface for interactive involvement of the viewer, offering each and everyone the possibility of creating an individual soundtrack. The vast, engine-driven factory is accommodated in an institution dedicated to contemporary art, like an ironic comment on the mechanisms of the production of artifacts and cultural policy. The m-city­ factory produces nothing, it serves no useful purpose, but it stirs the senses nevertheless, and its huge dimensions emphasize the transformations that contemporary culture is undergoing. This factory needs no workers. The engines that keep it going require little attention. The ghostly nature of the installation evokes a vague sense of danger and forecasts the end of physical work.

The installation highlights the notion which is common nowadays that physical work is disappearing. However, the end of work foretold by Jeremy Rifkin has not happened – its means has merely been shifted. A traditional Ford factory has indeed disappeared as the machines has been sent off to China. Workforce has been reduced and reeducated, and their work is now performed elsewhere. The factory is thus an image of the industrialization myth and its revolutionary connotations which, in Europe, have become history. Yet, is a contemporary museum not similar to a traditional production plant in a number of ways? Perhaps the factory and its mechanisms have been imposed on the entirety of societies, and Leaving the factory is no longer possible. Escape from productivity is the only way to oppose neoliberalist order.

Mariusz Waras
– born 1978 in Gdynia. A graphic artist, outdoor painter, traveller, amateur architect. Graduated from the Department of Graphic Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk where he is currently assistant lecturer in Prof. Jerzy Ostrogórski’s painting studio. The author of the m-city project including several hundred murals. His work focuses on urban space. His murals may be seen in the streets of Warsaw, Gdańsk, Berlin, Paris, Budapest, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Bolzano, London and Prague, as well as in art galleries, including individual exhibitions at the Arsenal in Poznań (2005) and the CSW Łaźnia in Gdańsk (2006). He is also a curator of the 238x504 hoarding gallery in Gdynia as well as an archivist / collector of Polish street art. Freelance graphic artist, frequently awarded in various contests.

Krzysztof Topolski, aka Arszyn
- born 1973. A percussionist, electronic musician, improviser, creator of sound installations. He records as a solo artist as well as in collaboration with Emiter. In 1998, he was a cofounder of the workshop Pracownia Ludzie Gdańsk, he was also a member of the group Ludzie. Involved with the group Kobiety, the project RogulusXSzwelas as well as with the group Dzieci Kapitana Klossa. Initiator of the cycle of lectures Muzyka współczesna dla gospodyń domowych [Contemporary Music for Housewives]. Organizer of the educational projects Warsztaty Piezo and Roślinki, owoce i kwiatki in CSW Łaźnia as well as the sound workshop Kapusta at the Feliks Nowowiejski Musical Academy in Bydgoszcz; he conducted workshops in listening and acoustic ecology. Topolski performed at a number of festivals, including Stimul, Plain, Turning Sounds, Unsound and Alt+F4. He received a grant from Museums Quartier in Vienna. Organizer of the project Audio Tourism Kaliningrad-Gdańsk. He composed the music for Stanisław Wyspiański’s drama The Curse directed by Łukasz Kos. In 2007, he received a grant from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage for his project Arszyn_Emigrant.

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Andrzej Tobis
A-Z (Educational Cabinets)
Curated by Joanna Zielińska

In 1954 in Leipzig Bildworterbuch Deutsch und Polnisch / A German-Polish Illustrated Dictionary was published. This book is a remarkable compendium of knowledge about the world at that moment, and at the same time a bold attempt to classify and describe concrete reality by means of entries, indexes, and charts. To render the dictionary more ordered, its authors introduced 15 parts to cover various domains of knowledge: from a political system, through economy, culture, to the human body and botany. The dictionary contains numerous language pitfalls and weaknesses in translation, which are the source of surprising information for a careful reader.

The publication became a starting point for Andrzej Tobis in creating a special archive of images. The artist searches the world around him for visual equivalents of the dictionary entries and photographs them. One of the conditions he made while working with the Polish edition of the German published dictionary was that all the photographed objects and situations should be sourced in the territory of Poland. In the A- Z (Educational Cabinets) series, 400 entries have been identified, nearly half of which have been realized in the form of educational cabinets. The collection is constantly increasing. Two years after the start of his project the artist came across the third edition of the dictionary, from 1967, which became an additional source of artistic analysis. The revised edition is a kind of addendum, where, according to the artist, we may observe the progress of civilization and the liberalization of ideological lines, although the contents of the book remain largely the same.

Each photograph of the A-Z (Educational Cabinets) series has been assigned with an entry in Polish and German along with an index number. The dictionary is nothing more than an excuse for the continuing search for the next entry and descriptions of the world around the artist. Andrzej Tobis’s photographs are created with an unusual care and a sense of humour and unveil the slippage contained in the words and their meanings, in the photographed images and the concepts assigned to them. These numerous shifts, ambiguities and undertones constitute the greatest value in the project. Tobis does not arrange situations, he just records his observed daily reality. Some of the photographs are portraits of people he met by chance. In these cases, as the artist says: if the photographed person asks me ‘How should I stand?’, I always answer ‘It’s up to you’. The melancholy contained in the images presented is also very surprising, invoking nostalgic memories of a time that has passed - walking around the city, shopping in a local shop, or children’s games in a park.

Andrzej Tobis- born in 1970, a graduate of the Katowice Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow. He is above all known as a painter employing traditional methods. The first opening of the A-Z (Educational Cabinets) project took place in 2007 in Kronika Gallery in Bytom. The photographs were shown as a part of the artist’s individual exhibitions in Rome, Berlin and Dusseldorf and at several collective exhibitions. The exhibition in the Centre of Contemporary Art in Toruń is the largest presentation of the project so far.

Image: Andrzej Tobis

Press informations:
Kasia Toczko katarzyna.toczko@csw.torun.pl tel. +48 56 610 97 23

Exhibitions opening: 23th October, 7 PM

Centre of Contemporary Art Znaki Czasu in Torun
Waly gen. Sikorskiego 13
87-100 Torun, Poland
Opening hours
Tuesday 10:00 - 18:00
Wednesday 10:00 - 18:00
Thurdsay 10:00 - 18:00
Friday 12:00 - 20:00
Saturday 12:00 - 18:00
Sunday 12:00 - 18:00
Monday closed

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