Milk me sugar

 
 
 
Wittgenstein abounds in adages. “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” may be that best known. Language as an expression of thoughts, their image. It is worth remembering, however, that “in order to draw a limit to thinking we should have to be able to think both sides of this limit (we should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought).” The shocking nonsense of “milk me sugar” is all the more abstract – since it refers to coffee. This is not so much logic as a method. An expressly relevant method.
 
Lacan claimed that a thing becomes something only in language, coming into being in the act of naming. A good Polish example is gender equality. A few years ago, in a media frenzy and to the sound of bigots’ anxious chuckling, feminatives became the staff of our lives, sealing emancipation of the feminine gender in language¹. For political reasons, we, the women of Poland, have decided to unequivocally gender the subject, although the Polish language gives much more licence when it comes to a revolution. My favourite example of the language’s plasticity is a definite article in the form of a pronoun preceding a multigender noun (usually, denoting a profession, a role or a characteristic), which entails an extra confusion, not only as to its declination or a lack thereof. At present, we are living in a revolution of linguistic politeness. “Hmm,” no more has crossed my mind when, in one of social media recordings of the Women’s Strike demonstration, I heard: “the police demands that persons disperse” (a megaphone voice issued a warning that violence would be used, elegantly phrased as ‘measures of direct coercion’). The neutrative ‘person’, transferring a burden of gender from a noun to an adjective, a gerund or a pronoun modifying the noun, is the word-symbol of the revolution of equality, diversity and inclusivity. And the otherwise paradoxical situation from a street of Warsaw confirms that a de-stigmatised reality, a reality of empathy and care we would like to share, requires that we utter it first. And demonstrates how this spreads.
 

 
 
The exhibition is concerned with language and communication, broadly. It begins with a wave (physics), drawing attention to the fact that a mere emotion can be a communication, but also pointing towards the moment in which matter begins to matter. The most attention is paid to contemporary manifestos and observations of changes, instances of narratives embodying demands of equi-diversity. It also draws on tales of international artists working in Poland, frequently decoding a colonialism hidden in (the) language. It also recovers works created in the era of Conceptualism, when operations on language helped to deconstruct ways of seeing, and language became one of inextricable instruments of art.
 
 
 
 
* Brud (1970-2038)
 

¹ https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Polish/More_on_nouns_-_genders (transltor’s note)