Kuba Bąkowski: A Boy and His Dog

Kuba Bąkowski: A Boy and His Dog

Budapest, VI. Andrássy út 32.
Hungary

This time, the line runs between the present-day media-, technology-, and information-defined civilisation and its hypothetical future expansion. The shape of Bąkowski’s futurological vision is influenced by the sci-fi culture, which is both the inspiration here and the object of pastiche. The artist himself appears in the exhibition through a self-portrait; he was the model for the human figure in the work Boy and His Dog. The hyper-realistic sculpture shows a wanderer taken straight out of a cyberpunk dystopia. Dressed in an anti-radiation suit and carrying oxygen tanks, the figure may be the survivor of a global ecological disaster, or even a cosmic hobo wandering through the solar system – in the company of a dog, of course.

Boy and His Dog resemble characters from post-apocalyptic anti-utopia movies in the vein of the Mad Max, stories whose protagonists live in a post-catastrophe world, recycling the remnants of a fallen civilisation and building peculiar hybrids of advanced technologies and primitive, improvised survival techniques. The question of technology plays an important role in many of Bąkowski’s works.

The artist often reaches for a convention that could be described low-tech cyberpunk: the human being is in a state of symbiosis with technology here, while at the same time being oppressed by it…

…fragment of Stach Szabłowski’s essay “Other Flying Objects” from the catalogue of Kuba Bąkowski individual exhibition “Air-Sculptures And Other Flying Objects” at The Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, 2006

Kuba Bąkowski (1971), graduate of the Multimedia Comunication Faculty of the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan (MA diploma in 2001). Lives and works in Warsaw.

The work of Kuba Bakowski can be defined as experimental activities on the borders of photography, film and performance. He is mainly known by his analytical, ironic and intentionally absurd realizations that reflect on a reality full of paradoxes. He has shown his works in both solo and group exhibitions at the Zachęta National Gallery and Zamek Ujazdowski Centre of Contemporary Art in Warsaw. He has also taken part in group exhibitions at Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna, Museé d’Art Moderne in Saint-Etienne, Artspace Sydney, National Centre of Contemporary Art in Moscow, Palazzo delle Arti Napoli, and Chelsea Art Museum in New York. Bakowski was awarded several times with grants by Ministry of Culture of Republic of Poland; Trust for Mutual Understanding (USA); Adam Mickiewicz Institute (Poland).

http://www.kubabakowski.net

A Boy and His Dog from the collection of Podlaskie Towarzystwo Zachęty Sztuk Pięknych in Białystok, Poland.

Opening of the exhibition: on Thursday, 20 September 2012 at 6 p.m.

Opening speech by Endre Paksi, art historian