Performance by Daniel Kotowski during the opening of the exhibition ‘Common Landscape / Greeting a Stranger’

“delighting” – performance by Daniel Kotowski during the opening of the exhibition ‘Common Landscape / Greeting a Stranger’ at the Arsenal Gallery power station, Białystok – 28.03.2025 (Friday), at 6 pm

28.03.2025 (Friday)
Opening of the exhibition Common Landscape / Greeting a Stranger – 6 pm
“delighting” – performance by Daniel Kotowski
Arsenal Gallery power station (elektrownia)
Elektryczna 13 (entrance from Świętojańska St.), Białystok
free admission

Daniel Kotowski, “delighting“, performance

A look of delight. Trying to grasp it was never a part of the plan; he admires the swift movement of hands, he moves his gaze around, he gives names to things. He sees them as beautiful in the way one weaves hierarchies. The beauty of the other that ensures the fullness of one’s being. A beauty to climb on; perhaps to pity. The swift and flexible hands, “the vulnerable one”, the weak flower, the seeming silence (of what lives beyond his understanding). Swift is the movement through the world inside pity. No zig-zags, no languages one doesn’t grasp — just a language that others have failed to learn. Adjustment. Synchronicity. A singularity of alphabet. And in the midst of it, the glitches of your discomfort. Mumbles and stutters that bounce off the walls, making a zoo out of your thoughts on nature-culture borders. And, on your margins, our pleasures, languages that live their own life, beyond any need for validation. A beauty much different from the surface you brush with your gaze, thinking you know what you’re naming, to our pain, to our laughter.

A worldly order to hide your discomfort. Curiosity turned into fear. The whole us–them that never had to be a big deal if hearing wasn’t mistaken for listening. We look at you watching us. We listen to you hearing us. We also look and listen beyond, or somewhere else. It’s neither a race, nor a delight. Or, the delight is ours.

Paired with de-light. The shift, the redirecting of attention. Morphing the violent pleasure of cold light, or appropriation, into something of our own. Sipping your discomfort. Like bees, our ears grow wax for your immunity. Something to be nourished, not pitied. You don’t get our jokes anyway.

A knife dripping honey. Whose pleasure, whose speech? Whose clown? Whose audience?

In his new performance, Daniel Kotowski is referring to the video work ‘Wonderland’ (2016) by Erkan Özgen. The Turkish artist portrays a deaf protagonist, a small boy describing his family’s brutal experience of war in Syria and the process of fleeing. In an interview about the work, Özgen expresses delight over the boy’s bodily expressions, at the same time not realizing that these are gestures of a home sign language; instead the artist merely shows his fascination with its aesthetics. He delights in the artistic traits of these movements while simultaneously closing them within the realm of that which is primitive; using the boy to produce, as if creating an expressionist painting, or colonial anthropology, defying a possible translation.

Daniel Kotowski is thus deconstructing the seeming innocence of aesthetic delight dripping from legitimised culture, which softly and swiftly romanticises and disavows the legitimacy of “other” – “other” bodies, languages, worldings. Delight and violence are not a coincidence but a colonial gaze paired with culture, simultaneously disavowing the vulnerability of the viewer. Kotowski acknowledges performance as the space of shared dis/comfort and vulnerability, and refutes the margins co-constructed by the stage itself — or rather — appropriates them, twists them, shifts them, (de)lighting what’s peripheral, exposing the facade of the seeming centers — the delight of confirming one’s status quo, not less within the arts. Kotowski chooses to redirect the light, to confuse what’s noticed or named as legitimate, to question what’s even a part of the (or one’s) universe, and the deep dive into notions of beauty, romance, the delight. Is ours.

text: Weronika Zalewska 
performance: Daniel Kotowski
costume: Paweł Włodarski 
choreographic consultant: Alicja Czyczel