AGAINST ALL EXPECTATIONS – Fundacja Profile

AGAINST ALL EXPECTATIONS

Opening: Saturday, 04.03.2023, 7 pm

The exhibition will open untill 06.05.2023
Tuesday–Saturday, 12 noon–7 pm
Profile Foundation
Franciszkańska 6
Warsaw

Free admission

Andrzej Dłużniewski, Jarosław Kozłowski Romuald Kutera, Paweł Kwiek
Andrzej Lachowicz, Andrzej Paruzel, Józef Robakowski, Andrzej Różycki
Zdzisław Sosnowski, Jerzy Treliński, Teresa Tyszkiewicz
Zbigniew Warpechowski, Ryszard Waśko, Krzysztof Wodiczko

Situating photography between record and painting delineates an area of non-obviousness in the perception of many photographs. All the more so when it concerns photography from the 1970s, when it became an almost indispensable medium in the practices of artists continuing avant-garde traditions. We know most of these practices from photographs and documentation, which we also often look at today in terms of images rather than mere records. However, the history of the medium does not always intersect with the history of paintings. Today, we see both more and less in these pictorial records. Their sense cannot be reduced either to past meanings going back several decades or to their current reading.

Clearly, we read into them the ideas of the radical practices of the neo-avant-garde revolt, experiments with the tensions between medium and reality, the aspiration to transcend the boundaries of visual perception or to take art beyond the institutional framework.

The photographs presented in the exhibition show the whole spectrum of analytical, conceptual, media, processual, and social issues of the art of the time: performative actions, often improvised for the camera (Andrzej Dłużniewski, Teresa Tyszkiewicz, Zbigniew Warpechowski), actions in public spaces (Jerzy Treliński, Krzysztof Wodiczko), on-camera performances and analytical recordings of seeing reality (Andrzej Lachowicz, Romuald Kutera, Zdzisław Sosnowski), investigations concerning inter-media relations, especially the opacity of photographic records (Józef Robakowski, Paweł Kwiek, Andrzej Paruzel, Ryszard Waśko), technological experiments that relativise the credibility of photographs (Andrzej Różycki), and the pretence of objectivity in photographic records (Jarosław Kozłowski).

There is no way to question the critical potential of these activities. From today’s perspective, however, we see much more in what they record, and it is no longer just a matter of successive revisions of conceptual clichés, from beyond which emerge more and more of the author and the body, affective experiences and dilemmas or a sense of humour bordering on irony. In fact, in a preposterous reading of the art that connects the past to the present, our perception of these records turns out to be largely a contemporary creation in which different interpretative tropes overlap. Looking at the photographic images gathered in the exhibition, it is sometimes difficult to resist their evocative visuality, the rhetoric of the imagery itself. Perhaps not quite as expected, in their simultaneous ‘discursiveness and visibility’ the latter begins to take over the imagination. To paraphrase the title of a famous book, one could ask: what do we actually expect from these images?

Curator of the exhibition: Bożena Czubak