The launch of the book Questions by Grzegorz Kowalski

Galeria Arsena in Bialystok is pleased to invite You

to a meeting and the launch of Grzegorz Kowalski’s book “Questions”

as part of the cycle “Is Art Necessary and Why?”.

29 April (Wednesday) 2015, 18.00
Galeria Arsenal, ul. Mickiewicza 2, Bialystok
The meeting will be held by: Patrick Komorowski (Galeria Pola Magnetyczne)
admission is free of charge

Grzegorz Kowalski’s book, “Questions”, recalls three actions/questions from the turn of the 1970s/1980s when the artist was actively involved at Warsaw’s Repassage gallery: “Would You and Would You Like to Portray an Animal in Front of the Camera?” (1977-1978); “Would You and Would You Like to Treat Me Like an Object” (1979), and “Would You Like to Return to Your Mother’s Womb?” (1981-1987). For Kowalski, who studied under Oskar Hansen and was intimately familiar with his Open Form theory, art was a form of communication. He used existential questions to provoke friends and sometimes strangers to look within themselves. He would then collate the replies – short texts and posed photographs – into tableaux or art books.

Kowalski so described the “Questions” process:

When nagging questions emerge, I try to ask them to several other persons in order to learn their reactions. This creates a sum total of reactions, a statement no longer just mine but ours. A multiplicity of reflexes reflected, as in mirrors, in other people’s experiences. A person who needed contact with an art work becomes involved in the process of its making.