What does it show if it shows nothing? What is here? Is it cramped or spacious? What are we waiting for? How many bodies are here? What is outside and what is inside? Oskar Dawicki’s "non-exhibition" was intended as a prelude to the exhibition Abandoned. A vestibule to the next stop of the stranger’s (obcy) journey. An insertion and a disruption in the cycle of exhibitions. We had been planning it since early autumn 2021; we thought it would happen at the end of November, then perhaps December. We eventually surrendered to the impossibility of planning anything. Even planning nothing could not be planned, so we stopped. The non-exhibition waited and swelled in its non-occurrence, yet remained a constant, subliminal gnawing. The artist announced something while showing nothing. That is how we thought of it then. "It was meant to be more of a personal pre-meditation," Oskar said. It wasn't meant to refer to the situation of the war we have now—but now it cannot not refer to it, because everything refers to it. At that time, we were still living through the pandemic and the humanitarian catastrophe on the border with Belarus. We were experiencing anxieties of isolation or post-isolation. We wanted those hiding in the woods, camping on some pseudo-border—an impassable line established by someone—to survive and be able to live on. A sense of absurdity grew within us; grief swelled. A trap and a clinch. A kind of struggling within it.
We now enter a seemingly empty room. There is no exhibition; nothing is being exhibited here. There are, however, walls; they define certain boundaries of the room, they cut something off from something else, quite physically designating a space. There are some nail marks on these walls. Some bodies slowly fill this room. They brush against each other or scatter loosely. They take in the void and what is present. In one of the walls, there is an opening commonly known as a window. Outside, it is as if someone were sitting. Outside, on the windowsill. Beneath the ceiling, a ventilation grate breathes—or perhaps something trapped there wants to get inside. Something lives on the edge of life. We are alive, and we are supposed to live. They are glad they survived. What is this "something" that separates something from nothing? The empty from the full? Is a border something tangible? Something visible?
