“Project Metropolis” is the largest yet exhibition of contemporary art to set out to create an up-to-date image of Upper Silesia and the Dąbrowa Basin. The exhibition is the corollary of a three-year project involving an international discourse of visual and sound artists as well as theoreticians who treat visual arts as a tool of cognition rather than one that implements a pre-conceived thesis or idea.
The programme “Project Metropolis” was based on artistic residencies in the region of Upper Silesia and the Dąbrowa Basin and on actions relying on the activities of local residents. Throughout the process of creating the works an emphasis was placed on working with the local community and on promoting contemporary art where it had not penetrated before and where there were no art institutions. The fruit of the project was dozens of new art works by international artists from diverse artistic communities.
The exhibition reveals parallel and distinct cities within cities, regions within regions that exist side by side. For do we really know our region, our city, our regions within regions? Do they have a single image, or are there many? Perhaps, there is a host of overlapping images that blend together: those we wish were true and those that we wish were not, those that stem from tradition and those that clearly defy it. Project Metropolis takes into account manifold perspectives: social, economic, historic, cultural and political. It creates a new iconography for Silesia, which meets today’s transformations and contemporary challenges.
The issues raised by the artists include: individual memory, the relativity of history and borders, archival work, the effects of the Polish transformation and the glories and pitfalls of modernisation, the presence of national minorities, language, economic exclusion, transformations of the labour market and landscape, diverse concepts of the region’s future, social participation and the re-writing of art history. The exhibition design by Łukasz Błażejewski is a work that lends organic coherence to the exhibition, binding together artists’ individual, autonomous statements. The eponymous terms ‘Metropolis’ and ‘Project’ refer to the futuristic concept of the region as a single organism. Simultaneously, the territory of the execution of the works has been approached as a glocalist activity matrix, capable of providing universal interpretations of the problems of contemporary world, no matter in what region.
Stanisław Ruksza, curator of the exhibition
http://www.muzeumslaskie.pl/projekt-metropolis–wystawa-finalowa.php
Instalace video / installation of video – Opěrné body/ Support Points / 2014
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