CEZARY KLIMASZEWSKI A good piece of advice

Opening: 10.09.2010, opening hour: 18.00

Open until: 1.10.2010

A good piece of advice, or: Back to the Future, directed by Cezary Klimaszewski

When encountering works of Cezary Klimaszewski, either individual or those created in cooperation with an art collective known as Pawilon Stabilnej Formy (the Pavilion of Stable Form), each time we get the impression that the artist has set himself a task to storm a chosen place. This happens regardless of whether the object of his “attack” is a gallery or, as in the last case, a church. Nonetheless, it is never a gesture of an anarchist whose sole aim is to strike a blow against the existing order. Klimaszewski is rather an ironist who subtly reverses meanings, despite the fact that in order to so he predominantly uses the weapon under which the existing reality would actually yield. (…)

The proposal that Cezary Klimaszewski brings forward at the Biała Gallery is an individual continuation of the earlier undertaking. To put it simply, in his project titled A Good Piece of Advice, Klimaszewski comes up with the idea of an underground church, which would be an alternative to the existing one, and yet which would reconcile the requirements of a sacred place with an already violated idea of OF. What appears to be the key element of the exhibition is a scale-model envisioning the building in question. Next to the building, the author has placed a relief illustrating the church as seen from above, together with the overlapping system of rooms and corridors. Additionally, among others, the artist has provided graphics illustrating plans of the said structure seen from various angles, as well as a hand-made sketch of Hansen’s project involving decentralisation of the gothic Church of St. John in Gdańsk. All of the above, including a black-and-white video presenting reversed flight of a plane filming the “drama”, has been placed between two photographs of different sizes. The first photo reveals the shape of the housing estate in its original form, while the latter, taken from the same perspective, serves as an introduction to the status quo. In a separate room we can find a video in which the artist traverses the interior of the remaining part of the community centre just before its demolition, juxtaposing his walk with images of the monument being razed to the ground by construction workers.(…)