18 November 2022

Opening of the exhibition "Tectonic Shifts. On the Artistic Symptoms of Transformation" at Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź

From 18 November 2022, the exhibition "Tectonic Shifts. On the Artistic Symptoms of Transformation" can be seen at Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, showing four works by Paweł Kowalewski from his series of sculptural display cases made during the transformation era, commenting on those uncertain times. The exhibition examines artistic responses to the systemic transformation and how it changed the face of the country's economy, art and culture. The curator looks at this — contrary to appearances — slow and uneven process of change, drawing out its highs and lows, arranging in the halls at 36 Więckowskiego Street a story of what artistic reality looked like just before and after 1989. The exhibition dispels the myth of a single magical turning-point year after which everything suddenly changed. The title's "tectonic shifts" are a metaphor for gradual change with hard-to-predict effects and non-obvious beginnings. Such shifts, however inconspicuous, completely transform the ground beneath us, the landscape, and often the lives of the organisms that inhabit it. In the curator's words: "The title metaphor lets us move beyond a narrow understanding of transformation as a single, clean break that happened in 1989 and changed the political and economic framework. The exhibition Tectonic Shifts treats transformation as a process: the persistent friction and interpenetration of two systems, the simultaneous fading of the old order and the emergence of the new. In the 1980s and 90s, the tectonic plates of East and West pressed against one another, eventually forming a new rock formation — the periphery of global capitalism. But before that happened, there was movement: ambiguous, delirious, at times violent, always full of subcutaneous tension. In 1991 Zbigniew Sajnóg declared: Art — a sensitive barometer of humanity's condition, its pre-conceptual probe. This exhibition treats art in a similar way — as a symptom of change, a visual testimony, an expression of its time." Tectonic Shifts focuses on two fundamental planes: one concerning changes of the spirit, the other of matter. The exhibition tries to capture how the two interact, through several dozen works, many shown here for the first time, accompanied by archival material and documents of social life. From them emerges the main trajectory of transformation: a movement from hope to disappointment, from diversity to homogenisation, from activity to stagnation.