CRITICAL MASS #3

 CRITICAL MASS #3

08 08 ---21 08 2025 PLENUM Dawna Stocznia Gdańska / Former Gdańsk Shipyard

curator Grzegorz Klaman

collaborating curator Piotr Mosur

This is the third time that we are putting on an exhibition of young artists who take a critical stance on reality. To be committed in art requires courage and determination and often comes at a social and political cost as censorship of all kinds from across the political spectrum is only to be expected. A critical stance does not focus on a single political option or a particular set of moral or religious values, it addresses every aspect of the world around us. It is an invaluable tool for active participation in social life and co-creating an open perspective; it also requires courage on the part of those who support and present it, as well as those who are willing, with full consciousness, to participate. It is the expanding of the field of culture, the language of artistic expression, and the building of tolerance. Critical art enjoys a status that allows it to transcend or, at least, violate, the boundaries of habit, aesthetic norms and the formal limitations of the so-called work of art, while at the same time channelling its energy toward potential viewers, cajoling them to participate in experiencing the new. Multidisciplinarity is a language of expression well suited to the complexity of the themes and content shown at the exhibition, also in the sphere of new technologies – new imaging which pose new and surprising challenges to the young generation. The main goal of this project is to inspire trust in the radical gesture performed by the artist, to prepare the viewer for appreciating the creator’s intentions and the role contemporary art plays in the shaping of our consciousness. Here is what Serge Daney thinks about the relationship between image and visuality: “(...) he claims that visuality leaves no room for seeing in the sense of creative distance but creates a fully saturated spectacle that is substantially indifferent to the viewer’s gaze.” That is why, in contemporary culture, “(...) our eyes receive a constant inducement, but we see nothing” /Daney/. The image, however, is still capable of “perforating visuality now and then” as it contains an empty space, a distance, a crack opening up the space of experience /Mościcki/. Commodified vision bounces off the smooth surface of the visuality of everything; we look for images free from flashy appropriation, complex and internally critical, offering space to us for our presence.

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Serge Daney, Du visuel au visage, [in] Mościcki Paweł, My tez mamy już przeszłość, p. 61

Mościcki Paweł, My tez mamy już przeszłość, Guy Debord i historia jako pole bitwy, Bęc Zmiana Warszawa 2015