IN ONE CUT? Paweł Krysztof Kasprzak

8-21 August 2025 PLENUM Dawna Stocznia Gdańska / Former Gdańsk Shipyard
Curator Grzegorz Klaman cooperation Piotr T. Mosur

The project spotlights two young artists that stand out for their critical stance towards the realities of cognitive capitalism and their active revisiting of the demand for applied and socially effective art.
The decomposition of avant-garde postulates, their dissipation, calls for an effort to map out the field of art and breathe new life into it. Having developed in response, these attitudes represent a distinct course of action embarked on by the artistic subject between the autonomy of art and art as a tool of power-knowledge in the area of pervasive consumption. Accepting Bruno Latour’s suggestion that the traditional division between facts and values should be abandoned, thus situated activity /artistic
practice/ invariably constitutes a realm of experimentation. It is our belief that apoliticality and neutrality are nothing but a showy appearance because “politicisation relates to the very fact of inventing this irreducible difference (between facts and values),” it is an appearance because, in fact, art deals with problems seemingly indifferent or neutral, but, in effect, is about the division of roles between the resources of the political in relation to the field of re-production and appropriation as the essence of cognitive capitalism /Latour/. We never give up striving to renew the relations of the very imperative behind artistic action within ruptured reality towards another reconfiguration. With a single cut, we lay bare a layer of fermenting compost.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            Grzegorz Klaman

I have an interest in the phenomenon of violence. I look for its manifestations and examine what triggers it. I am an observer, anthropologist and commentator of it. I take a critical approach to its symptoms, I especially focus on its systemic, cultural, and socio-political
dimensions. I do not consider myself an artist despite engaging in artistic practices – I am an art worker applying them in my work. I desacralise spaces in art galleries by bringing up the motif of labour that has so far been pushed to the artistic margin.

Monument of Fall a ready-made / site-specific installation composed of used work gloves and shipping crates. An anti-monumental form where two types of objects intimately linked to the physicality of a worker’s toil begin to take on the structural characteristics of a monument.
The context they imply highlights the phenomenon of alienation. Plastic shipping/storage crates are mostly used in such distribution centres as Zalando, Amazon or Rossmann – places where workers are no longer involved in the creative/productive process. Places
where their only task is to replace machines, being – from the capitalist perspective – a cheaper solution.

Paweł Kasprzak