Things and People

Things and People

Dineo Seshee Bopape 
Tymek Borowski
Rafał Bujnowski
Marta Mariańska
Paweł Matyszewski
Shana Moulton 
Pavla Sceranková 
Jiří Skála
Pavel Sterec

 

The phenomena and changes taking place in our society are an important element of anthropology of things – the field of anthropology that focuses, in a broad sense, on people’s relations with things. Similar explorations are undertaken in the world of art – many artists work with objects, which become the protagonists, subjects, the starting points or the essence of their final creations. The artists’ interest in material culture and the meaning of objects have a long tradition in art history. However in recent years a growing artistic reflection on the human condition presented through things can be observed. Through an object or a thing the artists observe various social groups, study their cultural identities or try to present the spirit of a particular time and place. 
 

 

The title “Things and People” signifies the broad scope of the project – from the mutual relation between things and people, through the issue of the materiality and things’ persistence in time, to the symbolical value of things. The title was taken from the book Rzeczy i ludzie. Humanistyka wobec materialności [Things and People. The humanities in the face of materiality], published by the University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn in 2008, which describes the intensified reflection of the humanities on the issue of materiality. 
 

 

The exhibition presents the works of nine artists born in the 1970’s and the first half of the 1980’s. The works displayed in the Arsenal Gallery are concerned with emotional, obsessive and sentimental relationships between people and things. The works presented in the Arsenal Gallery deal with a number of issues – things as subjects of individual studies, things as fragments of dynamically changing reality, as well as the conditions and circumstances of their production. Dineo Seshee Bopape, Pavla Sceranková and Jiří Skála have never presented their works in Poland before. Tymek Borowski, Marta Mariańska, Paweł Matyszewski, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Jiří Skála and Pavel Sterec present their new works, or special instalments of projects which have been developed in recent years.                         

 

translated from the Polish by Konrad Pormańczuk

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co-finansing by The Ministry of Culture and National Heritage

Media patrons