Więzi nas w nie-miejscu. Ugrzęźliśmy w strefie tranzytowej i tkwimy tu, nie wiadomo jak długo jeszcze. Odwołany lot zaburza rytm funkcjonowania. Wprowadza błąd do systemu. Potrzebujemy czasu żeby się odnaleźć, jednak niepokój przedłuża się. W niemiejscu nie można się rozgościć. W niemiejscu gości niepokój i bezczas. Error, pętla. Ruch wokół jest pozorny. My przecież stoimy w miejscu i czekamy.
Wszystko jest post bo wszystko jest w loopie.
Jesteś w nie-miejscu, Właśnie dowiedziałaś/eś się że twój lot zostal odwołany. Patrzysz się w ekran swojego smartfona. Dotykasz palcem jego gładkiej lśniącej powierzchni. Telefon padł, ale na jego czarnym ekranie odbija się informacja z telewizora lotniskowego flight canceled. Czekasz. Siedzisz, leżysz. Patrzysz, nie patrzysz.
It imprisons us in a non-place. We are stuck in a transit zone, and here we remain, for who knows how long. A canceled flight disrupts the rhythm of functioning. It introduces an error into the system. We need time to find our bearings, yet the anxiety lingers. You cannot make yourself at home in a non-place. In a non-place, anxiety and timelessness take up residence. Error, loop. The movement around us is an illusion. After all, we are standing still, waiting. Everything is post- because everything is in a loop.
You are in a non-place. You have just found out that your flight has been canceled. You stare at the screen of your smartphone. Your finger touches its smooth, glowing surface. The phone has died, but the airport television's information is reflected on its black screen: flight canceled. You wait. You sit, you lie down. You look, you don't look.
Flight Canceled is an exhibition about the loop.
Janek Płatek’s paintings are a meta-game with painting itself. Sustaining a moment, a microsecond of completion. Holding one's breath before a screen. Accelerating changes by vigorously pressing the spacebar. It is a moment without a hero, when the pixelated world—always unreal, imprisoned in code—grinds to a halt. Everything is on the surface, adhering like a pixel to the infinite grid of a display. The representations Płatek uses are clearly devoid of a skeleton, a center, a core; they are a negation of the materiality of painting which—in this gesture of abandonment and shedding of weight—strives for a record that is material by necessity, yet seems to defy gravity and the progressive loss of meaning. It is an ocular manifestation. A persistence, a hang-up, an error.
The loop—which can also be understood as a kind of suspension—is the main formal vehicle of Michał Rostocki’s works. These pieces exist on the borderline between text and the moving, programmed image known from the first computer games. Looping is the DNA of these representations. Derailed, they bore, ripple, and intersect; like the sound of Tibetan bowls, they induce a state of being beyond sleep, but also beyond the materiality of existence. These works are like the rain in Blade Runner; they are like Vangelis's Blade Runner Blues. A few synthesizer notes stretched over time, repetitive passages, and the hum of falling raindrops frozen in one-hour and eight-hour versions prepared by some maniac on YouTube. I listen to this.
Irena Kalicka has relocated things. A mess of meanings, untruths, contemporary symbols of struggle, and citations. An accumulation you want to escape from, but in escaping, you hit a wall—a wall where everything disgustingly Polish, inhuman, and unjust settles. A Baroque approach, a spectacular fall, a serenissima of the absurd, a twisted status quo of existence within a constantly returning chaos. Welcome home. It has already made itself at home here. The walls will not protect us; they are no barrier; they are leaky and cracked, despite the renovation and subsequent layers of putty and white acrylic paint.
Maria Rostocka’s comic begins where it ends. Seemingly gently painted, successive fragments of the story reveal a familiar history of violence. The daring action of this comic only attempts to cover up a truth—known though misunderstood by most—that violence breeds violence. Another loop. This forest, this road, these people. It is all current. And it happens over and over again.
This is an exhibition about the method of storytelling, about a certain aspect of a tale which is its repeatability, its infinite looping. About numbness, about being in transit, in a state of suspension, in timelessness. The four artists are united by their way of narrating and using visual language. Although the works are far apart formally and thematically, they share the same bracket at their edges. The chuckle of history, which constantly forces us into the same shoes.
Anna Maria Karczmarska, Mikołaj Małek
