curatorial text
   

curatorial text
   

Info

Something – not an exhibition, but a space for experiencing.
Something that changes is the desire to turn the gallery into a resonance box.
In time is to find a place in fluidity to stop and concentrate.

We don’t want to create an exhibition to go in, see and leave. We want to create a place to stay for longer. Something that changes in time is a proposal to enter a space for experiencing, the aim of which is, through the reduction of stimuli, sounds and images, to allow you to listen to the different sound bands and notice how they attune to each other. In a space to contemplate, to savour the subtlety of detail, to meditate sonically, or simply to fall into the deep boredom that Benjamin wrote is necessary to awaken creative thought and is being displaced by a capitalist system in which productivity is put on a pedestal.

What is the point of production, including the production of exhibitions, art, and music in a context of excess, overstimulation, fatigue, being crushed by the amount of novelty and difficult information that fills to the brim our perceptual-cognitive capacities?

For those who enter, we offer a certain point of view inspired by the thought of architect and educator Oskar Hansen, who, when designing architectural spaces, took into account their active negative, that is, the immaterial part where life takes place and houses our breath. In the spirit of this concept, we shift our attention to what happens between the space, the works, the artificial intelligence and the audience, to the tuning of independent elements that necessarily influence each other, resonate with each other or not and generate change. Following this thought further, we want to build the impression of entering the interior of an instrument whose resonant box responds to our presence.

We pay attention to the sounds that occur spontaneously in nature and their constituent, single tones and selective bands of sound coming from surrounding objects. They do not have an author, they are part of the potential of things, and the authorship of the resulting live composition is shared by the audience present inside. We want to focus on the process, how our bodies feel sounds and interpret them in an environment with limited stimuli, and how such conditions promote deep listening. According to such assumptions, each person inside the experiencing space becomes its receiver and creator.

The space changes, develops and layers over time. The playing elements change their sounds, and new sound sources appear. Susan Sontag wrote that efficacious artwork leaves silence in its wake. We want to start with silence and consciously experience its transformation into the non-silence we generate, to look at the emerging composition, to better understand relationships. Speaking of silence, we mean its illusion, because as long as we have something to breathe, and as long as the air vibrates under the vibration of sound, we will not stop hearing background noise, but we can consciously treat it as part of the whole.

In a broader context, these activities are a continuation of our practice of Attunement, which we started during the last WRO Biennale, penetrating the needs, moods, and states of the audience co-creating the art space.

Gosia Wrzosek