auction catalog / learning, acting, sharing / razem pamoja foundation

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About the charitable auction Learning, Acting, Sharing The Razem Pamoja Foundation is co-created by philosophers, artists, curators, amateur thinkers of the contemporary world, who know perfectly well that in adult life the thoughtful attitude guarantees freedom from the tried-and-tested solutions.

The activities of the Foundation are primarily grounded in intuitive and idealist urges, derived from the inspiration with the atmosphere of the 1970s, when people of this planet had the impression that they shared more things in common than things that divide us.

We describe our activities with such soft terms as “educating for co-operation”, or with our motto: “Learning, Acting, Sharing”. Some of the results of our activities are well-worth mentioning here:

- mural exchange between schools in Kenya and Poland; - the making of the book Into Africa, KiP 2014; - art projects organised at the Bookstore | Exhibition in Krakow (www.księgarniawystawa.pl) and its mirror space, the Mathare Art Gallery in Nairobi, Kenya (www.facebook.com/matharegallery); - the funding of scholarships developed in co-operation of Kenyan and Polish students and teachers; - exhibitions in established institutions e.g. Kombucha at the Bunkier Sztuki CAG in Krakow (2015) or What’s New under the Sun, the joint project of the Seweryl Udziela Museum of Etnography in Krakow and the Nairobi National Museum (2014) in Kenya; - our co-operation with the publishers: Le Monde Diplomatiqe, Karakter, Zed Books, and JRP Ringer.

We understand all these soft actions to be activities based not on giving, appropriating, arranging, but on exchange, co-operation, dialogue held between people living at a considerable distance from each other.

The artists who have donated their work to the Razem Pamoja Foundation co-operate with us according to the paradigm, or will shortly become our collaborators. Some of them are our friends and simply appreciate the Razem Pamoja style of acting. Some are our friends’ friends.

We hope that all the donated works will create an ethical assemblage in our pre-auction exhibition, and the work which you decide to purchase will be a source of a double pleasure, one arising from owning the work and another – from sharing; and that they will provide for the opportunity of organising the following art and social actions, connecting small fragments of the global South and the global North.

Bartosz Przybył-Ołowski Razem Pamoja Foundation

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Grupa Luxus Ewa Ciepielewska, Bożena Grzyb-Jarodzka, Paweł Jarodzki, Jerzy Kosałka, Gosia Plata, Szymon Lubiński, Yola Jacek Jankowski - Ponton, Staszek Sielicki

Title:Voodoo Africa Technique: assemblage Creation date: 2015 Dimensions: 300 x 300 cm Voodoo Africa by the Luxus Group is an artistic gesture and gift made out of pure idealism. The installation was jointly made by the art collective at the Bookstore | Exhibition – the Razem Pamoja Foundation gallery in Krakow. The emergence of the installation made a number of people, both in Krakow and in Nairobi, aware that significant political and artistic action, making a powerful impact on real life, can be taken. The joint work demonstrated that it is possible to pursue an honest activity which is not preceded by weeks of negotiation, independent of the creatively limiting system of grants. When presenting Voodoo Africa at the Bookstore | Exhibition and discussing the installation, we noticed its extraordinary power. Therefore, the Luxus Group and the Razem Pamoja Foundation have decided to share the energy by gifting the work to the collection of the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw.

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Maciej Chorąży (1982)

Title: Chamaeleonidae BIC Technique: photographic print C-type print on Fuji paper Creation date: 2013 Dimensions: 30 x 40 cm Author’s commentary: The photograph was taken in Gotland (Fårö ), where next to a large rusty metal structure I found an equally rusty BIC lighter.

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Iddi Bashir (1980)

Title: Stop Violence against Girls Technique: oil on canvas, charred wood Creation date: 2014/2015 Dimensions: 63 x 50 cm Iddi Bashir is a painter based in Nairobi. His painting was featured in our exhibition Kombucha, organised at the Bunkier Sztuki Contemporary Art Gallery in Krakow. Bashir defines his work through his existential needs and limitations. One of them is the creation of the space depicted by his painting, a mirror space of impossible worlds, where there is no conflict and violence, observed daily by the artist in Nairobi.

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Jonny Briggs (1985)

Title: Opia Technique: photography installation Creation date: 2013 Dimensions: 41 x 30,5 cm Edition: 6/26 The title of this new work comes directly from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows a project by John Koenig aimed at creating new words to name emotions that otherwise leave us speechless. Opia refers to “the ambiguous intensity of looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable as if you were peering through a hole in the door of a house, able to tell that there’s someone standing there, but unable to tell if you’re looking in or looking out.”

The work reproduces an archive photo of the artist as a toddler which has been manipulated in order to reveal only the eyes. As in many of Jonny Briggs's works, Opia takes inspiration from familiar memories and images while challenging the viewer’s curiosity of knowing what is hidden and inaccessible.

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Ewa Ciepielewska (1960)

Title: Mug of Soup Technique: acrylic on canvas Creation date: 2012 Dimensions: 50 x 50 cm Signed: [pieczęć autorska]

Author’s commentary: The work was made on the basis of patterns with portraits of Stanisława Przybyszewska. At the time, my attention was captured particularly by histories of women who lived and worked in the early 20th century. I came across Letters of Stanisława Przybyszewska published by Wydawnictwo Morskie in the 1980s and then I learnt about her personal history in the context of the era at first hand. She was an uncompromising personality, with original views that left no doubts about her opinions, which made her contact with her environment rather difficult, leading finally to isolation and acute poverty. In her letters, I came across a sentence that provides her most apt characteristic. It went as follows: “The relation of creative power to personal goals can be compared to that of the heat of a steelworks furnace to a pot with soup” – this needs no commentary.

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Tatiana Czekalska (1969) i Leszek Golec (1959)

Title: Individual Technique: photography, C-type print on Fuji glossy printer photo paper, dibond, plexi Creation date: 2011 Dimensions: 40 x 26,7 cm Author’s commentary: …Because an observed INDIVIDUAL is only visible, it cannot be proved that he exists and thus the impossibility to prove his material existence does not tell us anything about his existence or non-existence. It is certain that he is not large and that he informs us about HIMSELF by leaving traces, white hair, scraps of algae, bryophytes, slime molds, and berries…

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Alicja Dobrucka (1985)

Title: No. 7 from the series Concrete Mushrooms Technique: digital print, C-type print Creation date: 2011 Dimensions: 60 x 60 cm Alicja Dobrucka, a graduate of Goldsmiths College and the London College of Communication, is a photographer focusing on the issue of memory constructed by images, whose meaning is not made conscious at first sight. In the context of her main focus, it is worth noting her project Concrete Mushrooms, for which the artist made photographs of bunkers constructed by the Albanian communist dictator, Enver Hoxha, in the astounding number of 760,000. Interestingly, the horrifying testimonies to the Cold War global conflict have in time become another element of everyday life of the inhabitants of the former people’s republic.

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Bogusław Bachorczyk (1969)

Title: Czechoslovak Charm Technique: assemblage, paper, plastic, acrylic on canvas Creation date: 2011 Dimensions: 40 x 30 cm Signed: Parada Dzień Zwycięstwa / dżins i komuniści / jeansy / B. Bachorczyk 2011

Komentarz autorski: A ceramic replica of “Brotherhood” („Sbratření”), a monument by Czechoslovak sculptor Karel Pokorny created in 1947. “Vkhutemas Yard”, a photograph by Alexander Rodchenko from 1927 and a piece of fabric called teksas, a Polish substitute for jeans, are featured in the painting. The work was designed as part of a series presented during the “Tak i nie” [Yes and No] exhibition at the National Museum in Kraków in 2012.

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Justyna Górowska (1988)

Title: untitled Technique: photographic print, ink print on Photo Rag 308 g paper Creation date: 2015 Dimensions: 84 x 60 cm Author’s commentary:

In April 2015, I went on a beautiful car journey with three friends in a self-appointed art collective IAMESH. We travelled through idyllic United States, calling our journey #AmericanDreamArtTour. We spent one month together on art-making, playing and resting. We captured every precious moment, going through Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California. The photograph is a caption of a moment in the Valley of Death, close to Las Vegas. Just as our entire journey, the block visible in the photograph is a subtle trace of human presence in the beauty of endless landscape. The work was featured in the IAMESH exhibition, organised in 2015 at the bookstore | exhibition on Józefińska 9 in Krakow.

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Piotr Janas (1970)

Title: untitled Technique: oil on canvas Creation date: 2010 Dimensions: 100 x 80 cm Signed: Piotr Janas 2010 Author’s commentary: It is a portrait of a man that I met a few years ago at the bus stop on Rozbrat street in Warsaw, towards the Praga district. He was smoking a cigarette and have probably suffered from untreated syphilis, which deformed his head.

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Barbara Bańda (1980)

Title: Connected from the cycle Recycling Technique: ink, water-paint on paper Creation date: 2012 Dimensions: 42 x 42 cm Signed: Basia Bańda / Związani 2012 Author’s commentary: In pieces from the cycle Recycling, I re-used successful and redeemed fragments of unsuccessful paintings.

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Łukasz Jastrubczak (1984)

Title: Flag in Space Technique: print on fabric Creation date: 2015 Dimensions: 238 x 146 cm Author’s commentary: This composition has been created as part of the work on geometric collages called “A Flag in Space”, which I tend to create intuitively with a full awareness of their formal connections with non-object abstract art of the first avant-garde wave. However, the most prominent part of my work is the way I arrange these geometrical shapes. My supremacist compositions feature geometrical figures that hover against a boundless background. Figures in my compositions support one another. If you take one of the figures away, the whole composition might crumble to pieces. Thus, we can examine the whole composition as an abstract form, free from physical relationships or any reference to reality; and as a simplified visualisation of an object structure, a machine structure that is easily dismantled when devoid of any of its constituent parts. Equally important to me is the tension between its uniqueness and serial qualities. The prototype for “A Flag in Space” was

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provided by an intuitive collage created by a Central European artist in his studio. The collage was then multiplied by 20 serially produced flags supplied by a China-based factory manufacturing banners for their global clients. The selection of colours used in the composition of the flag is dependent on how often a given colour appears, statistically, in the gamut of colours on all the flags of the world. This means that if red is a predominant colour in the flags worldwide, the final composition will also abound in red. A series of failures triggered by the work after it had been presented during the Narracje Festival was also a very important aspect of its execution. The flag was intended to fly in a duty-free area, which, economically speaking, does not belong to any state. For unknown reasons, the management of the duty-free area refused to display the flag, which is why it was finally mounted several metres from the fence separating the duty-free area from the rest of the airport. The flag was elevated one day before the festival, during very windy weather. It was very difficult to do this. However, the two subsequent days of the festival were completely windless, which meant that the flag and the composition it featured went completely unnoticed. And last but not least, the flag was unintentionally elevated upside down, which has a massive effect on how a flag representing a particular country is displayed. A question remains what meaning is conveyed by a flag that features an abstract composition and is upside down?

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Ewa Juszkiewicz (1984)

Title: untitled Technique: oil and acrylic on canvas Creation date: 2009 Dimensions: 61 x 50 cm Signed: Ewa Juszkiewicz 2009 Author’s commentary: The painting has been created as part of a larger series dating from 2008–2010 that mainly features portraits. The focus of my interests at the time was on the niches and fringes of society. I was then inspired by unusual and non-standard representations that often attract social and cultural disapproval. Figures that are extreme or marginalised, physical abnormalities. Freak shows, weirdos, and misfits. I am enclosing a short excerpt from Robert Jarosz's review of my works from that period: “(...) Ewa Juszkiewicz creates inner portraits, as it were, and ironically deconstructs the classic portrait convention. The duality she produces spans between unsettling and uncomfortable tension and a deliberate use of humour. The painted figures are keeping up appearances or join in a masquerade and grotesque, which brings to mind both classic painting and pop culture representations.

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Hal Samples (1972)

Title: King of Palisades Technique: photographic print, digital print on canvas Creation date: march 2009 Dimensions: 86 x 73 cm Hal Samples, the founder of the IAMESH, once came across Tachawa Covington, an eccentric living in an abandoned fuel tank on the outskirts of L.A. This outstanding home's interior was transformed by its owner into an artwork that emanated with unique energy. The tank also captured Banksy’s attention, who added a graffiti on it reading This Looks a Bit Like Elephant. Unfortunately, this inadvertently resulted in evicting the tank's resident. The meeting between Hal and Tachawa marked the beginning of an intense relationship. Its resident became the main protagonist in Something from Nothing, a documentary Hal shot in 2011. One of the scenes features Tachawa wearing a crown on his head like a ruler of his unique world. Hal presented a photograph of Tachawa's suspended from a ceiling like some sort of religious wall hanging at the exhibition held at Księgarnia/Wystawa, which also featured Justyna Górowska's and Adam Gruba's works. The proud face of this independent king of imagination from the outskirts of L.A. was hovering lightly above your heads.

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Irenka Kalicka (1986)

Title: untitled from the series The horse you see is the horse you get Technique: photographic print, lambda print on Fuji mat paper Creation date: 2013/2014 Dimensions: 30 x 45 cm Signed: Irena Kalicka / Bez tytułu z serii "Koń jaki jest każdy widzi" / 2015 / edycja 1/5 Edition: 1/5

Irenka Kalicka’s photos from the cycle The horse you see is the horse you get – inspired by individual entries from Nowe Ateny [The New Athens], the first Polish encyclopaedia – are an ironic play on the commonplace associations and stereotypical views on the world. As in the 18th-century encyclopaedia, the images created

by Kalicka are based on mediated representations and concepts. They are equally constructed by the photographic convention of the 1990s, the colonial freak shows, kitschy wallpapers and museum exhibitions, advertising images and folklore. Their realism is mixed with mise-en-scene. The costume covers individual features. Appearance pre-empts meaning. The natural appears artificial, and the farce simulates the truth.

The multi-layering of visual meaning and interpretive traps set up by Kalicka force us to forgo literality and to trace the network of associations, sources and allusions. In her exploration of contemporary images and cultural clichés, Irenka Kalicka goes against our grain. She precludes categorisation and easy generalisation.

She makes schematisation impossible, since the nature of stereotypes is precisely simplification, ignorance, and the ensuing false beliefs about reality. Authorised by tradition, stereotypes are difficult to change, but one should once again consult the New Athens – “a dragon is hard to defeat, but it’s worth your try”.

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Andrzej Karoń (1975)

Title: untitled Technique: photographic print Creation date: 2015 Dimensions: 61 x 91 cm Edition: unique Author’s commentary: The work has been designed as a set element for Andrzej Karoń's performance “Ex-HI-bit”, which was on display at Księgarnia | Wystawa (2015). It represents a much enlarged imaginary photograph that documents the bequest of 16 pieces of rhinestone to the museum. Some of the rhinestone pieces are naturally shaped as hexagonal columns, while some other were cut by craftsmen. The bottom of the photograph features a 30-cm-long and transparent ruler with navy blue elements on it. The ruler allows the viewer to estimate the size of the objects recorded in the photograph. Since photographs of this type are usually added to museum catalogue files as copies that are ca. 10x15 cm in size, the decision to enlarge it by six alters their interpretation and perception and transforms a documentary photograph into a form of an artistic expression.

As the author of the photograph reveals, the rhinestone pieces come from a private collection, whereas the photograph gains in value as its only existing copy (the author has accidentally lost all digital copies of the photograph).

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Tomasz Kowalski (1984)

Title: untitledbez Technique: gouache on paper Creation date: 2015 Dimensions: 55 x 67 cm Signed: kowalski 15 This watercolour is one of the latest works by Tomasz Kowalski. It resembles other paintings from the series, which was presented in 2015 as part of his individual exhibition at the Tim Van Laere Gallery, in that it follows fictional characters in an intricately created world that is governed by the rules of its own. It represents figures which, as the author reveals himself, are forced into being themselves. They find little to no comfort in their original identities. This is demonstrated by the shape of their bodies which are reminiscent of the English word “no!� They are not happy with their situation. It is a paradox, however, that their rebellious gesture serves as their own reflection. What we are dealing here with is double negation, or the negation's negation.

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Karolina Brzuzan (1983)

Title: Population in Million Technique: steel, paint Creation date: 2015 Dimensions: 160 x 66 cm For several years, Karolina Brzuzan has worked on her project Hunger Cook Book, in which she is concerned with dishes made in moments of extreme food shortage brought about by the rampant ‘geopolitics of hunger’, resulting from forcing the so-called ‘developing countries’ into a spiral of debt. Brzuzan empathetically addresses the problems of war, corruption, land theft, genocide. She observes the testimonies of global humanitarian crisis, which the so-called ‘developed countries’ seem to overlook by building walls, fences and other, more sophisticated, economic barriers. Her sculpture Population in Million depicts the statistics of hunger and malnutrition distribution in the world. It was first presented at her individual exhibition Noma at the CCA Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw; the exhibition title refers to the name of an expensive restaurant as well a terrifying disease caused by chronic malnutrition, predominant in children.

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Ewa Axelrad (1984)

Title: untitled from the series The Plague Technique: silk-screen on paper Creation date: 2013 Dimensions: 100 x 70 cm Signed: 12/35 [artist’s signature] Author’s commentary: The silk-screen was created for the Winter Saloon (2013), where it was exhibited as a draft for the ensuing series of works as part of the show The Plague: Physical Description. The group of exhibited works addressed various systems of purification. It featured e.g. drawing of road drainage, funnels and kidneys.

Courtesy of the BWA Contemporary Art Gallery in Warsaw

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Paweł Kruk (1976)

Title: Please Don't Leave Me Technique: photographic print Creation date: 2012 Dimensions: 43 x 40 Signed: PAWEŁ KRUK / 2015 / EDYCJA 2/5 Edition: 2/5 The work refers to the practice of Bas Jan Ader who in his deeply personal art referred to isolation, loneliness, and the emptiness of death. The artist was known most of all for his legendary disappearance in the infinity of the ocean during a lonely journey on a boat from America to Rotterdam in 1975, which constituted the second part of the trilogy titled In Search of the Miraculous. Paweł Kruk used the documentation of the installation made by the Dutch artist who lived in the USA titled Please Don’t Leave Me. The installation, presented in 1969 at the Bojimans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam, expressed a dramatic attempt to make an actual contact with others which, as Ader seemed to suggest in all his works, is impossible within the realms of art. According to him, life was somewhere else. Paweł, who for many years has been writing a script for a film about Ader, has reworked a reproduction of the installation from Rotterdam. Please Leave Me Alone, says Ader in Kruk’s version. It is an expression of his reflections on the very intense use of Ader’s figure within contemporary visual arts. Ironically, with all his works. the Dutch artist posited the need to leave behind the paradigm of art up to the radical gesture of withdrawing from life at large.

Courtesy of Galeria Dawid Radziszewski

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Piotr Krzymowski (1989)

Title: And She Was Like...

Technique: gouache on paper, collage Creation date: 2015 Dimensions: 80 x 115 cm Signed: Piotr Krzymowski 2015 Author’s commentary: Until recently, this collage hung in the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel in Warsaw. Inspired by the context of this strange and popular meeting point, the work incorporates elements of overheard conversations and observed behaviours. Flirting with the aesthetic history of the Polish School of Posters and the Polish society magazines of the 1950s and 60s, the work recollects their foregone vocabulary, typography and graphic design in order to cajole its anonymous viewers.Â

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Agnieszka Brzeżańska (1972)

Title: untitled Technique: oil and acrylic on canvas Creation date: 2002 Dimensions: 97 x 130 cm Signed: A. Brzeżańska 2002 Agnieszka Brzeżańska’s painting is dedicated to the success of Polish women volleyball players. However, when looking at the painting, it is impossible to miss its dramatic character. The character stems from the general nature of the work of the artist, who in her art draws attention, as she herself claims, to the “ruptures in the shell of reality”, which “reveal chaos, anxiety, the bottom layer hidden under the guise of an ordered and secure world”. Her photographs, films, sculptures and paintings demonstrate an insightful observation of reality, an archaeological gaze, which allows her to unmask the peculiar metaphysics of the everyday, in material testimonies to the disintegration and degradation, which are a natural part of the cycle of birth and death.

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Agata Kus (1987)

Title: GET OUT Technique: oil on canvas Creation date: 2015 Dimensions: 40 x 50 cm Signed: A. KUS / AGATA KUS/ GET OUT / olej na płótnie / 40x50 cm / 2014 „ Agata Kus primarily paints people, contributing to the recent triumphant return to the classical figurative painting. Her painting is characterized by a multiplicity of narratives, combined in one composition, which makes up for a multi-layered interpretation of each individual painting: following one of its themes, or their synthesis, composing new meanings. The indirectness and ambiguity of her paintings opens up an array of possible interpretations, or invites us to follow their extremely fascinating narratives. Besides, the artist employ numerous formal tricks, such as painted collages, pseudo-cut-outs, paste-ins, overlays and destructions, suggesting a juxtaposition of numerous compositions of various texture and technique.” (Agnieszka Gołębiewska)

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Marek Raczkowski (1959)

Title: Jaguar XK 8 Technique: acrylic on metal Creation date: 2016 Dimensions: 126 x 476 x 182 cm Signed: M.RACZKOWSKI 2016 Marek Raczkowski is the artist who drew thousands of cars. Jaguar XK8 is the first car on which he could draw and did so to his great pleasure. When I envisioned the organisation of the charitable art auction for the Razem Pamoja Foundationa, I decided to treat its values quite literally. Sharing what I have, or what I have in abundance, generates action, and action in turn enables understanding that is immersed in the practice of co-operation, which I exercise through my activity at the Razem Pamoja Foundation, whose motto is: Learning, Acting, Sharing. (Bartosz Przybył-Ołowski)

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Piotr Błachut (1968)

Title: What? Nothing!

Technique: acrylic on canvas Creation date: 2016 Dimensions: 104 x 74 cm Signed: [artist’s signature] One of the few acrylic painting of the artist, whose regular occupation, shared with his wife, Marta, has for over 14 years been running the healthy food shop, Naturalny Sklepik, on Krupnicza street in Krakow.

Naturalny Sklepik was the site of the project Into Africa, organised in 2013, during which we have been able to create together the magic energy that transformed into the publication of the book Into Africa, the result of co-operation of the children from Mathare Slum and from Rabka Zdrój. We made something of nothing – expecting nothing in return. Directed against thoughtless consumerism, the approach is characteristic for Piotr and Marta in their everyday life and work. The painting shows that it is also manifested in Piotr’s artwork, who also publishes his drawings in daily newspapers.

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Anna Kutera (…)

Tytuł: AUTO 06 Technique: photographic print, C-type print on paper Creation date: 2010 Dimensions: 70 x 100 cm Signed: Anna Kutera AUTO 06, 2010 Edition: 2/3 Anna Kutera belongs among the most interesting Polish woman artist to make their debut in the 1970s. She was part of the conceptual art movement and to this day remains an active participant in public debate. For the very beginning, her art was distinct in the perspicacity of her analysis of visual culture, which produced such works as e.g. Najkrótszy film świata [The Shortest Film in the World] (1975), made up of only one filmframe. Primarily, she should be remembered for her works in which a subversive rationality of conceptual art is employed to reflect on the theme of a more broadly understood metamorphosis of identity, conditioned by coming into contact with other, not only close, people, social and political contexts, and geographical location. An example of the practice is found in her Układ morfologiczny [Morphological System] (1975).

Anna Kutera is relentlessly vigilant to oppressive symptoms of the operations of visual culture. Since 2010, she has been working on her multi-media project POST, where she critiques visual culture overloaded with phantasms of reality. The work donated to our auction comes from the cycle Gazetowa miłość [Newspaper Love], which is created by destroying idealised media messages. As Gabriela Draguin aptly noted, in this project “the artist seems to be saying: everything carries a s

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Romuald Kutera (1949)

Title: The Rest of Odryka III Technique: photographic print, C-type print on paper Creation date: 2010 Dimensions: 70 x 100 cm Signed: ROMUALD KUTERA / from the cycle „Odryka”: / THE REST OF ODRYKA III - 2011, photography cprint No. 01.

Edition: 1/3 Romuald Kutera belongs among the most significant Polish conceptual artist. Since the 1970s, he has experimented in the media of photography, film, video, worked in performance, and with numerous other noteworthy artists co-organised the Recent Art Gallery in Wrocław. The work donated by the artist to our auction comes from the cycle of photographs, created since 2009, about the goddess Odryka, who is the artist’s original invention. According to Kutera, Odryka was an unruly daughter of Athena and Hephaistos, who was transformed by her Mother into an arrowhead shot to the north of Europe. Odryka is supposed to regain her divine shape, when someone washes the blood off the arrowhead. The legend was invented by the artist, while walking on the banks of the Kwisa and stumbling upon a very old, rusted arrowhead. “When I washed it, the water glittered in silver. The cloud of silver rose and fall on the bank. Suddenly, it assumed a shape of woman shrouded in blue fabric.” The name that the artist gave to the goddess, Odryka, denotes the one who was reborn in the Oder basin from the arrowhead – a symbol of the sun, love, rapture, diffusion, and knowledge.

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Agnieszka Lasota (1971)

Title: Work on the Unconscious, from The Draft Book (series 2011) Technique: collage, print on tracing paper, aluminium foil, Creation date: 2011 Dimension: 30 x 22 cm Agnieszka Lasota is one of the most interesting Polish woman designers. Invited to co-operate with the Razem Pamoja Foundation in 2015, she created at the Mathare Art Gallery in Nairobi a unique ceremony with the participation of the local priest, which confronted her previous work with a completely new context.

The artist announced the event: “Will the ritual of dedication and sacrifice of lamps, which I once designed and performed, assume some special power? Will the intentions inherent in the objects be more felt thanks to the memory of the moment and the symbolism of the ceremony? Will I be able to experience a spiritual excitement, or will the place of the ritual murder its metaphysical power? In my art, I try to observe and examine the phenomenon of spirituality. What do you require for the experience of actual spiritual excitement? Where does it start and where does it end?

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Sharon Lockhart (1964)

Title: Pine Flat/Rudzienko Box for Bartek Technique: installation Creation date: 2016 Dimensions: 28,5 x 35,5 x 7 cm Author’s commentary: The box is the effect of the extraordinary co-operation of two places that I love: the town of Pine Flat (the town is very dear to me, as I created there a significant work with a group of children just before leaving for Poland) and the town of Rudzienko (where for two years, together with Bartek, I collaborated with the girls from the Socio-therapy Centre at Rudzienko). The box contains a photograph of the collection of objects that I found, while walking in the environs of Pine Flat. In addition, I included me bag (my little Loves) with the names of all the girl participants in the Rudzienko workshop, an embroidered handkerchief and several objects shown by the photograph, which I wrapped in fabric bags. Pine Flat is a town in the southern part of the Sierra Nevada, with beautiful stones and plants, meaningful to the local Native Americans. Obsidian and flint were used by them to make arrows, which can be found in the near-by forests and fields. A stencil was printed on the box cover, which is a tribute to the heavenly girls of Rudzienko.

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Mikołaj Małek (1983)

Title: Lethal Banana Ends Technique: epoxy resin, wooden box, sponge Creation date: 2015 Dimensions: 18 x 28 x 5 cm Edition: 1/5 Banana ends are disquieting. Since early childhood we have been warned not to eat them, because they are poisonous and potentially lethal. The peculiar superstition has already been internalised by several generations of Poles. The absurd fear of banana ends aroused Mikołaj Małek’s interest, the artist whose works very often voice an ambivalent nostalgia for the times of childhood. The times of the artist’s childhood were the times of the fall of communism and the rise of capitalism in Poland after 1989. His interest was aroused by the banana, which suddenly stopped being an exotic object of distant longing, as its purchase became unproblematic. Despite the change of the fruit economic standing, the fearful superstition, already lodged in many mind, persisted. Mikołaj approached the fact in a humorous manner. First, he made a silicon cast of the terrifying banana ends. Next, he cast them in coloured resin, using a colour, which the artist claims to be lifeless. His original technique, which the artist usually employs in making nostalgic, filigree installations, composed of cast body parts and various, trivial objects, allowed him in this case to absurdly hyperbolise the fear of the fruit, whose dangerous ends are best carefully enclosed, like a gun, in a box with a latch. The banana ends, first exhibited at the Kronika Gallery in Bytom, were bravely placed, unprotected by any cover, on the gallery pedestal in accordance with the decision of Stanisław Ruksza, the head of the gallery.

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Małgorzata Markiewicz (1979)

Title: Patchwork Family “Ala loves Ola” Technique: farbric, embroidery Creation date: 2015 Dimensions: 55 x 86 x 09 cm Author’s commentary: Today, fewer and fewer families conform to the traditional, stereotypical and superficial concept of the nuclear family, namely 2+1 or 2+2. The reality is a multiplicity of different configurations. A text-book representation of a mother, father, grandfather and grandmother does not necessarily match the family setup that children experience at home. Patchwork Families is a work about these non-traditional families; families whose ties are strong within their own idiosyncratic set-up. Their strong connection highlights the ability of this non-stereotypical system to endure as a safe social unit.

I designed the first series of toys for the Bunkier Sztuki CAG Children’s Club, where they can still be purchased. This original series was produced by a female tailor, whereas the patchwork families are sewn together with my own hands. One of them already belongs to Zbyszek Sałaj, another to Ania Batko, and I donated a third to Razem Pamoja Foundation charity auction. The sewing of ‘Ala loves Ola’ - two lesbians and two in vitro children, was a direct reaction to the current political situation in Poland. Implicit within the work is a fear that soon Ala will not be allowed to love Ola, nor dream about having children.

34 z 92

Bartek Materka (1973)

Title: Stay, calm, breath deeply Technique: oil on canvas Creation date: 2015 Dimensions: 160 x 160 cm This plastic-wrapped Buddha attracted Bartek Materka's attention when he explored the vicinity of Bangkok, Thailand, in 2014. He entered a shop where he could buy factory packed gifts for begging Buddhist monks as well as many other items used for Buddhist worship. Bartek Materka is not a Buddhist. He was nonetheless intrigued by this plastic-wrapped figurine. He saw it through the filter of his own culture. He found it redolent of some works by Western artists who separate crucial messages with a transparent barrier.

He was intrigued by the resemblance of the packaged sculpture with Polish mass-produced religious items.

Represented in the painting, the figurine serves as a classic representation of the illuminated Buddha, who extends his hand as a master in a gesture called witarka madura, which suggests contemplation. The representation of Buddha is an important element of religious life. At the same time, the item serves as a commodity, one of many identical goods that are designed for those consumers that are hankering after what they call “real life�. By making the photograph monumental, the artist also encourages the viewer to focus their attention on an easily ignored visual phenomenon in which one can easily discern a globally felt tension between contemporary consumerism and the mythical experience of being.

35 z 92

Marta Deskur (1962)

Title: The Coronation of the Queen of Poland (Family II) Technique: photographic collage, lightbox, C-type print on paper Fuji trans Creation date: 2004/2016 Dimensions: 54 cm / 80 cm Signed: Marta Deskur / Koronacja kr贸lowej Polski / 2004/2016 The art of Marta Deskur, graduate of Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Aix-en-Provence, has become an important element of Polish art history of the last thirty years. In her practice, Deskur often addresses the issue of interpersonal relations. She challenges signs and symbols that form established models of cultural identities.

From the very beginning of her career, Deskur has been interested in the family understood as a group of people who are close to one another, not necessarily connected by blood ties, a relationship she creates herself rather than the one imposed on her. In 1999, she started making works from the series Family, which she made with her family and friends, regarded by her as members of her closest community. The work donated to the auction is a part of the famous series, yet it has never been exhibited. In contrast with other pieces in the cycle, she has not employed here Christian iconography. Instead, the portrait of the constructed family unit was modelled on a type of representation that formulates grand national narratives. Composition deprived of unnecessary background emphasizes the confrontation between her own image of the family and an imagined model of national community.

36 z 92

Dawid Misiorny (1986)

Title: Krata z serii Kombucha Technique: photographic print, C-type print on lambda paper Creation date: 2015 Dimensions: 124 x 83 cm Edition: unique Author’s commentary: Tatko & Batko took me on a journey. Kenyan Prince was on the line.

I said: OK. While I thought: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbeNGHhYTdg Let's go.

Kenya is not Kraków.

You need to show good manners.

Postcards from a journey like travelling ideas, eighty-four pages of folds, flames, and fire.

All you can do now is laugh.

37 z 92

Rafał Bujnowski (1974)

Title: Candle Technique: oil on canvas Creation date: 2015 Dimensions: 28 x 28 cm - all Signed: Bujnowski 2015 - all Each painting in Rafał Bujnowski's series represents a wisp of smoke hovering in darkness above an extinguished handle. The work, as it is often the case with Bujnowski's paintings, seems to have come naturally to the artist. His knack should not be taken for granted, however. It is worth considering, for example, why Bujnowski wants to capture this fleeting moment just after putting out the candle? What do you associate this moment with? When do you extinguish a candle in your lives? At birthday or on deathbed?

What makes you cast your thoughts to the light-filled past or the obscure future as you engage with the paintings? Is there any poetry to this? Why did the artist decide to represent the evanescent track left by the flame as a triptych, which is typical of religious painting? Why does he strive to elevate this moment? Do empty spaces in between the paintings have any meaning? Maybe they express a short period of time when the smoke undergoes metamorphosis? Add this pitch black element to it... a depressive colour which nonetheless fails to be depressive for some people and some cultures. What does this all mean? You have to answer this question for yourselves. One thing is certain, though, that these ostensibly banal paintings are capable of provoking some deeper reflection. Interestingly enough, they are nothing but paintings.

38 z 92

Elisabeth Molin (1985)

Title: Pigeons Technique: photographic print, Giclee Print on paper Creation date: 2012 Dimensions: 38 x 51,5 Signed: [artist’s signature] Author’s commentary: Pigeons is from 2012 and part of a series of work where I engage with public monuments. For this particular work I placed breadcrumbs on the monument of the Royal Albert hall which was next to my school. The bedcrumbs attracted the pigeons.

39 z 92

Paweł Olszczyński (1985)

Title: untitled Technique: pencil on paper Creation date: 2015 Dimensions: 53 x 37,5 cm Author’s commentary: The work comes from a larger cycle of drawings, in which various types of juxtaposition of a strictly defined repertoire of forms and motifs (from art history, fashion, design, etc.) create surrealist still lifes and landscapes. The work is composed of a juxtaposition of two motifs: fencing net and wood; it might resemble and actual look of urban landscape – a cut-off, in-grown tree branch, but the surface – suggesting a table/ working place – created a kind of still life.

40 z 92

Paulina Ołowska (1976) in co-operation with Alicia Wysocka (1985)

Title: Kombucha Technique: neon Creation date: 2014 Dimensions: 146 cm x 75 cm Paulina Ołowska is renowned for her numerous works made of neon lamps, a technique that creates a longing for the original advertising medium, which used to be popular only a few decades ago. Neon adds could be witnessed in the streets of Warsaw, which changed at night into a city strewn with colourful lights.

Ołowska’s neon signs are exhibited in galleries or, according to the artist’s preference, in public spaces, which are best fir for their appearance and allure. Among her spectacular neon works, the most notable are: Volleyball Player (2006) on Plac Konstytucji, a central square in Warsaw; Museum (2009), situated at the entrance to the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, located in the former furniture market, Emilia; and the collage of Warsaw neon sings – Babuszka [Old Lady], Krowa [Cow] and Bukiet Kwiatów [Bunch of Flowers] – presented on the streets of Graz (2010). Her neon collection has been recently enlarged with The Parrot, which the artist placed at the entrance to the Razem Pamoja Foundation in Krakow. Ołowska commented on her work: Parrot. Abstraction. Colours. Tropics. My Favourite Bird. Marcel Broodthaers. Connects, invites, speaks, entices. Kombucha. Drink, potion, fungus. New age. Utopia. Parrot inviting you for kombucha? Parrot as the Pamoja bird.

41 z 92

Marlena Biczak (1989)

Title: Repetition Scheme from the cycle Twilight Technique: aquatint Creation date: 2014 Dimensions: 81 x 110 cm Signed: e / a „schemat powtarzalności” [artist’s signature] 2014n Author’s commentary: The graphic works from the cycle Twilight are an attempt at re-creating specific emotion not through their form, shape or symbol, but in the ambience emerging from within and affecting the entire work. They are a notation of feelings arising at the edge of waking and sleep. Significant elements have been concealed, but unrecognizability is not absence.

42 z 92

Dobrawa Borkała (1990)

Title: The Space Is Where Mind Is Technique: painting on glass, lightbox Creation date: 2014 Dimensions: 60 x 60 cm Author’s commentary:

The work comes from my cycle Photo-Sensitivity, where I pay tribute to the fundamental role of light.

Photosynthesis supplies us with oxygen. Various species adjust their structure to light, thank to which they can co-form ecosystem. As for humans, sensitivity to light is also the source of visual perception, complete in the formation of an image through the workings of the nervous system.

43 z 92

Przymysław Branas (1987)

Title: Saint Sebastian Technique: photographic print, ink print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta 315 g paper Creation date: 2011 Dimensions: 50 x 35 cm Author’s commentary: The photograph comes from the series Saint Sebastian. I dedicated the cycle to the non-official patron saint of gay men – St. Sebastian. Christian iconography presents the saint as a youth spiked with arrow, bending from suffering in a martyr’s pose.

44 z 92

Agnieszka Piksa (1983)

Title: Safari Technique: ink on paper Creation date: 2015 Dimensions: 48 x 84 cm Author’s commentary: “It makes up 3 percent of my town’s budget, and we are not mammals who live being chased by other mammal who will devour us and that’s the way the world of benefit looks like”.

The work was made within the frameworks of the project Słownik kultury [The Dictionary of Culture] by Imago Mundi Foundation.

45 z 92

Joanna Piotrowska (1985)

Title: untitled from the series How are you.

Technique: photographic print, C-type print on paper Creation date: 2015 Dimensions: 50 x 56 cm Edition: 1/2 The photograph forms a part of a larger series of pictures taken by Joanna Piotrowska in Nairobi within the frameworks of the programme realised by Razem Pamoja Foundation. Photographs present men invited by the artist to a hotel room equipped with a huge double bed. Naked men stand or lie looking at one another, staring into the void or looking into the camera. Piotrowska also features in the pictures. Protagonists of the meeting in a hotel room in Nairobi engage in a physical contact with one another. A form of erotic tension is distinct between them, yet the artist’s gestures suggested certain reserve. While the men are naked, Piotrowska remains dressed. She avoids eye contact. She looks at the men when they are not looking at her.

She glances towards the camera when they turn towards her. The artist touches the men but those are not erotic gestures. They are strangely bringing associations with exploration. The photo-shoot documents the ambivalent relation between bodies and looking. The protagonists’ eyes turn towards the camera involving in this game also the seemingly “neutral” viewer.

Before her departure to Kenya Piotrowska made sophisticated photographs that reflected the “neutral” aesthetics of the art gallery. In a series of pictures taken in Nairobi she broadened the previously adopted convention. Just like in her earlier projects, such as Frost, she presents in the pictures people who form with each other ambiguous relations. Yet, some aspects have changed. Piotrowska’s new work includes coloured photographs whose aesthetics is not as austere as it was before. In the course of the selection process Piotrowska decided to accept imperfection and randomness of collected material. Moreover, as the artist said, her selection is not complete. The work is still in progress. Most importantly, however, the pictures include the artist herself documenting a very important experience of a direct encounter with the inhabitants of Nairobi.

46 z 92

Tomasz Prymon (1986)

Title: Mystery Train Technique: oil and acrylic on canvas Creation date: 2014 Dimensions: 105 x 150 cm Signed: Mystery Train 2014 olej/akryl Author’s commentary: The painting is designed as a still representing the final scene from “Mystery Train” by Jim Jarmusch. The need for recapitulation, which is so heavily invested with meaning by some, was taken lightly by Jarmusch. A setting that is far from specific, with no punchline and no summaries. Life goes on. The rhythmical lines that obscure the painted screen are reminiscent of my other painterly works. I am juxtaposing this scene with abstract, rhythmical lines to confront the two utterly discordant worlds.

47 z 92

Olivier Richon (1956)

Title: Art History Technique: photographic print, C-type ptint on paper Creation date: 2009 Dimensions: 44 x 36 cm Edition: unique Author’s commentary: Approaching visual allegory from a contemporary point of view, this photograph is the portrait of a living animal taken in a studio setting. The work reflects upon the animate and the inanimate, and the way in which a tension between the two is created by the use of photography. It remains ambiguous whether the animal is used to play a role, or if it remains alien to the intended staging. In her review of the exhibition in Frieze magazine, Sarah James describes the allegorical affect, “All of his photographs appear to connote highly specific meanings, yet refuse to give anything away. They are more parodies of allegories than allegories themselves, invested in the aesthetic of ambivalence and promising a narrative content or meaning that might unfold over time or, equally, never materialise.”

48 z 92

Mathilde Rosier (1973)

Title: untitled Technique: gouache on paper, acrylic on wood Creation date: 2015 Dimensions: 178,5 x 198 cm Author’s commentary: In traditional societies, art forms are generated to heal; to heal the individual or the social body, or to heal the individual or the collective soul. It is rare that they serve other functions.

Kenyan society is modern and at the same time maintains some elements of traditions.

Working with traditional dancers and musicians there, I explored their knowledge about trance dance and music as a collective healing practice. The project we carried out in Mathare, on the outskirts of Nairobi, was called “Re-Morphed Cultural Renaissance Against Dysfunctional Existence”. It was exhibited at the Mathare Art Gallery of the Razem Pamoja Foundation in summer of 2015. The title evokes this idea of healing.

I took this title from an ethnographic book about the reshaping of ethnic practices in South Africa in order to deal with the distress of people, given the current state of the country.

49 z 92

Piotr Bujak (1982)

Title: untitled Technique: clay, metal, glue Creation date: 2007 Dimensions: 35 x 22,5 x 16 cm Piotr Bujak used clay to create his self-portrait, an archetypal material, which according to many legends was the stuff of which man was made. However, the surface of the sculpture was made to resemble metal. The falsified material causes the object to appear heavier than it really is. It is not what it seems. On closer inspection, we soon realise that the outwardly raw sculpture is ceramics, concealing a gentle, fragile, pink insides. The work is very intimate. It was made at the time of its author’s emotional crisis. It can also be viewed as a more universal commentary on the frequently unnecessary superficiality of our relationships with others, which covers up far more complicated and fragile insides than their outward appearance. An awareness of the fact might foster a more honest, mutual experience of one another.

50 z 92

Adam Gruba (1988)

Title: America is a studio / Ameryka to studio Technique: photographic print, ink print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta 315 g paper Creation date: 2015 Dimensions: 60 x 90 cm Working as IAMESH art collective together with Justyna Górowska and Hal Samples Adam Gruba travelled in April 2015 around the United States. This very creative excursion resulted in the production of ephemeral works of performance art, land art and actions in public space. During the journey they made numerous photographs, some of which were presented at a group exhibition of Adam, Justyna and Hal in Księgarnia Wystawa in 2015. The picture the artist donated to the auction is one of many intriguing records forming a kind of journal of a person who confronts his images of the mythical country, known mostly from films, with reality.

51 z 92

Adam Rzepecki (1950)

Title: martwa natura / death nature Technique: paint on paper, assemblage, tea-bag strings Creation date: 2015 Dimensions: 48 x 58,5 cm Signed: A. RZEPECKI MARTWA NATURA/DEATH NATURE 2015 Adam Rzepecki belongs to the art circle which formed in the early 1980s the nation-wide art movement Kultura Zrzuty, based on the principle of selfless sharing of creativity outside the reach of any kind of institution. In the peculiar creative pack of humans, Rzepecki was an important figure, provoking action and non-action. He is famous for his legendary slogan NaprawdÄ™ nie jestem nihilist [I am truly not a nihilist], the uttering of which marked his entering into the arts. His work has for many years been very provocative, but never superficial. The work martwa natura / death nature was created as a result of an immediate, very often mythologised, contact with nature. The artist printed a tree trunk on paper, and marked the shadow of plants once cast on paper with white and red paint. An essential part of the composition is also strings from teabags, which the artist must have drunk, while admiring nature. The view must have been of the Tatra mountains, which Rzepecki greatly admires.

52 z 92

Jakub Julian Ziółkowski (1980) i Kuba Dinh Quang Minh (2005)

Title: untitled Technique: pencil on paper Creation date: 2015 Dimensions: 52 x 38 cm Jakub Julian Ziólkowski made the drawing in co-operation with a nine-year-old Kuba Ding Quang Minh, called Little Kuba, who is fascinated with drawing. Little Kuba is a Vietnamese, born and living in Warsaw, whose passion for drawing made his create a Drawing Club at his school. So far the Club has only several members. But that is just a start. Ziółkowski has been a long-standing supporter of Little Kuba’s talent. When the artist was invited to donate a work to charitable auction of the Razem Pamoja Foundation, which initiates creative co-operation of young people from distant countries, he found it natural to establish a co-operation with the young artist, to whom he is a mentor and a good, older friend.

53 z 92

Krzysztof Mężyk (1984)

Title: Receptive Room Technique: oil and acrylic on canvas Creation date: 2015 Dimensions: 200 x 170 cm Signed: KRZYSZTOF MĘŻYK „POKÓJ RECEPTYWNY” 2015 / 200 x 170 cm Author’s commentary: Woman On the crossroads of Krowoderska and Szlak Street there was sitting a woman and she was chilling out so badly that it got dusty, then alarm went off in a car passing. I was wondering whether she already forgot that we had given her “a couple of dimes.” And when we were in a shop on the corner I don’t know if she was yelling to us, I don’t know if anyone was passing there at all.

I can’t recover from this since yesterday. Luka said that that was probably her hobby. You can meet her at the crossroads of Krowoderska and Szlak Street at weird hours. I don’t know if she knows anyone at all.

Courtesy of Galeria Dawid Radziszewski

54 z 92

Paulina Ołowska (1976) i Fryderyk Bartosz Mikołajczak (2008)

Title: untitled Technique: collage, water colour paint on paper, pencil Creation date: 2015 Dimensions: 35 x 34 cm Signed: 26.12.2015 / Paulina Ołowska / Fryderyk Bartosz Mikołajczak Paulina Ołowska often co-operates with other artists. He has already created together with Lucy McKenzie, Bonnie Camplin and Sarah Crowner. Especially for our auction, the artist established a co-operation with Fryderyk Bartosz Mikołajczyk (aged 7). Their joint work features a press-cut with a woman model demonstrating an original stylisation, which is characteristic for Ołowska’s work. It is note-worthy that the a fashion magazine cut-out was pasted on a piece of paper painted with water colours of warm hues, orange and pink, which are also frequently used by the artist. The gentle composition was enriched with brave graphic works in pencil by Fryderyk Bartosz Mikołajczyk, whose themes arising from the artist’s preposterous sense of humour highlight the typically Ołowska light finesse and elegance. It is evident that the work is a result of uncommonly agreeable and mutually satisfying co-operation.

55 z 92

Helena Siemińska (1987)

Title: Pocket Technique: ink on paper Creation date: 2014 Dimensions: 46 x 57 cm Signed: H. Siemińska 14 Author’s commentary: The work comes from the cycle False Memory. My intention was not to illustrate real memories. I focused on their abstract and subtle nature. My cycle of drawing does not tell a story, is not a direct testimony of my past. However apparently incoherent and chaotic, it makes a map, constructed according to a network of associated images that have made an imprint in my memory, which is interwoven with repeated motifs and symbols. It is an attempt to visualise fragments of events that have made their mark on my memory as a weave of shapes, smell, sounds and emotions.

56 z 92

Mathilde Rosier (1973)

Title: untitled Technique: collage, gouache on paper Creation date: 2015 Dimensions: 46 x 63 cm Author’s commentary: In traditional societies, art forms are generated to heal; to heal the individual or the social body, or to heal the individual or the collective soul. It is rare that they serve other functions.

Kenyan society is modern and at the same time maintains some elements of traditions.

Working with traditional dancers and musicians there, I explored their knowledge about trance dance and music as a collective healing practice. The project we carried out in Mathare, on the outskirts of Nairobi, was called “Re-Morphed Cultural Renaissance Against Dysfunctional Existence”. It was exhibited at the Mathare Art Gallery of the Razem Pamoja Foundation in summer of 2015. The title evokes this idea of healing.

I took this title from an ethnographic book about the reshaping of ethnic practices in South Africa in order to deal with the distress of people, given the current state of the country.

57 z 92

Iwona Siwek-Front (1967)

Title: UHURU Technique: pastel on paper Creation date: 2014 Dimensions: 85 x 63 cm – each piece Signed: UHURU / 15:48 / +25 C / iwkaSiwek-Front / 2014 12.IX. Signed: UHURU / iwkaSiwek-Front / +28 C / 15.IX. / 15.00 / 2014 Iwona Siwek-Front’s paintings were created after the artist’s return from Nairobi, where she ran visual art workshop for children in Mathare Slum. The artist reacts vividly to the surrounding reality, formulating her message in a clearly legible manner. Ambiguous satire is vital to Iwona Siwek-Front’s artwork. Loyal to her convention, the artist makes both serious and sardonic work. Her doubtlessly charming art is understandable in any part of the globe, therefore it constitutes a perfect platform for learning, sharing and acting.

58 z 92

Slavs and Tatars

Title: In The Name of God Technique: acrylic on canvas Creation date: 2013 Dimensions: 112 x 108 cm Edycja: 2/3 (+1AP) The Slavs and Tatars collective gathers a group of international artists who, as they define it themselves, pursue their careers in the “region known as Eurasia, which stretches to the East of the Berlin Wall and to the West of the Great Wall of China”. They have emerged as a circle of international artists who are interested in insightful analysis of the contemporary world, which can be perceived as the effect of the ambiguous combination of political, economic, and cultural relations. They are said to practise the “archaeology of the quotidian”, as it were. Precise as pyramid explorers and with a massive sense of humour, Slavs and Tatars carry on observing the reality of contemporary globalisation. They follow the classics of contemporary humanities in that they focus on language analysis. They are interested in the genealogy of particular words and signs as well as the way they function in contemporary media structure.

They deploy the classic technique of irony to render the dreams and fears related to what we call universal discourse. They carry out projects that are exploratory by nature, exhibit in galleries, and work as publishers.

Slavs and Tatars' works are on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Contemporary Art Museum in Warsaw.

59 z 92

Ryan L. Moule (1985)

Title: Lixation Error Technique: photographic print Cration date: 2015 Dimensions: 48 x 37 cm Signed: Lixation Error / [artist’s signature] / 2015 / 4/5 Author’s commentary: Does Photography function like a Black Box? A visual recording from a crushed transmitter, holding the opaque clues to the violent disaster where the chalice was dropped, where the plane crashed, where the atrocities where perpetrated as Alexander García Düttmann suggested in the opera libretto Liebeslied/My Suicides. In photography dream and trauma collide. The photograph is no hard and fast proof that substantiates a history, it is closer to the dreamlike spectres that haunt the imagination. Not a fixed record of a past moment, but an unstable, unmoored, oscillating image, fleeting and precarious like half-remembered memories, open to infinite interpretations and contradictory readings and fragile, like the Roman frescoes exposed to Fellini’s cinematic wit. How to visualise photographically something that is not yet fully present, that is latent yet might already be sensed or presaged but goes beyond the visible material world? Fixation Error could be decoded as a conduit for the idea of the emergent or ‘Verwandlung’ (transformation), a pulsing instability. At its heart lies the imperative of change.

60 z 92

Karolina Spyrka (1987) i Piotr Ogorzałek (2008)

Title: Bye, Bye Betelgeuse!

Technique: oil and acrylic on canvas, assemblage Creation date: 2014 Dimensions: 45 x 40 cm The work entitled Bye, bye Betelguese! was created at the turn of August 2014. It belongs to a cycle of paintings, in which I allowed my 6-year-old son to intervene in my works. Drafts of paintings, hanging on the walls of our apartment, which then also served as my studio, were objects that tantalised the small child. So I decided not to stop the little PiotruĹ› from adding corrections, and with my encouragement he began to feel comfortable and free to redo my paintings in his original way. They grew with additional meanings. The symbiosis gave rise to several, unique painting that are very significant to me. Both because they are a result of our joint creative efforts, and because they turned out to be one of the last traditional paintings that I count among my works. The title of the painting alludes to the enormous star in the Orion constellation, Betelguese. The star has long been considered as an astral body in the state of impending death, although the time is uncertain, but when it happens, it will be clearly visible in our sky as a brilliant flash of a supernova. The process is both the ending and the beginning, a birth of new objects in the universe.

61 z 92

Łukasz Stokłosa (1986)

Title: untitled rom the series Fragments Technique: own technique Creation date: 2011 Dimensions: 28 x 19 x 11 cm Signed: Łukasz Stokłosa 2010 r The three objects come from the series Fragments from 2011. The key element of the composition was a large object, a fully furnished interior of a room. However, some elements had been removed from the interior: a window, one of the chairs, an armchair, a dresser… the interior became incomplete, broken. The elements were purposefully divided and separated from one another to become separate entities, sealed in wooden boxes, stripping them of their function and context. A model of the room and the removed elements would never be re-united, or exhibited together.

62 z 92

Łukasz Stokłosa (1986)

Title: untitled rom the series Fragments Technique: own technique Creation date: 2011 Dimensions: 15 x 26 x 14 cm Signed: Łukasz Stokłosa 2010 r The three objects come from the series Fragments from 2011. The key element of the composition was a large object, a fully furnished interior of a room. However, some elements had been removed from the interior: a window, one of the chairs, an armchair, a dresser… the interior became incomplete, broken. The elements were purposefully divided and separated from one another to become separate entities, sealed in wooden boxes, stripping them of their function and context. A model of the room and the removed elements would never be re-united, or exhibited together.

63 z 92

Łukasz Stokłosa (1986)

Title: untitled rom the series Fragments Technique: own technique Creation date: 2011 Dimensions: 16 x 35 x 15,5 cm Signed: Łukasz Stokłosa 2010 r The three objects come from the series Fragments from 2011. The key element of the composition was a large object, a fully furnished interior of a room. However, some elements had been removed from the interior: a window, one of the chairs, an armchair, a dresser… the interior became incomplete, broken. The elements were purposefully divided and separated from one another to become separate entities, sealed in wooden boxes, stripping them of their function and context. A model of the room and the removed elements would never be re-united, or exhibited together.

64 z 92

Roman Dziadkiewicz (1972)

Title: Three Pieces (collage, game, book, or past, present and future) Technique: mixed media Creation date: 2016 (book) 2014 (collage) 2012 (pack of cards) Dimensions: 18,5 x 18,5 x 1 cm (book) 42 x 32,5 cm (collage) 7,5 x 11,5 x 2 cm (pack of cards) Signed: 050 (book) R. DZ 14 (collage) R. DZ. 35/50 (pack of cards) Edition: 50/134 (book) 35/50 (pack of cards) The integral set/composition includes the collage from the project-dialogue, from Andrzej Partum’s archive (2014), the unique, signed pack of cards for the game “HIV urban flirt” (2012) and the artist’s latest work – a numbered copy of the s-f novel “Superficiology” (2015). The entire thing – for using, watching, reading, lending and creating new connections and relationships between its elements or persons participating in potential games and plays – is a multi-dimensional mini-installation of comfortable, portable and changeable size.

65 z 92

Anna Maria Karczmarska (1981)

Title: Album Technique: photographic print, C-type print on Fuji mat paper Creation date: 2014 Dimension: 22 cm / 15 cm - each Edition: 1/7 Author’s commentary: My installation Album was created for the exhibition Romantic Manifestations at BWA Sokół CAG in Nowy Sącz, as an allusion and extension of the figure of black wet-nurse from the performance of Adam Mickiewicz’s Dziady directed by R. Rychcik, for which I prepared the sets and costumes. Initially, the work was an installation composed of three photographs pasted in three empty, black albums. My work alludes to the tradition of bourgeois studio photography, which existed since the emergence of the medium. The type of photography serves the function of constituting the social order as well as a family souvenir. My work plays on these functions. I photograph myself disguises as a black wet-nurse in order to exorcise the stereotypical image of a black woman, engrained by travel and report photography, cinematography, and advertisement since the colonial times until the present.

66 z 92

Jakub Julian Ziółkowski (1980)

Title: Nausea Technique: oil on board Creation date: 2014 Dimensions: 30 x 25 cm Signed: Jakub Julian Ziółkowski 2014 „Mdłości” 30 x 25 cm Jakub Julian Ziółkowski is a consummate artist, whose work confirms the infinite power of imagination. His every painting, an effect of the workings of an extraordinarily free mind, might be the starting point for a breath-taking journey into the worlds of which we could only dream. Ziółkowski’s painting, created in a wonderfully free manner, overwhelms with a uncanny number of stimuli arousing our fancies. It is a case of art capable of convincing even the most adamant sceptics that it is precisely the imagination which is the mightiest driving force in changing the reality.

67 z 92

Łukasz Surowiec (1985)

Title: Black Diamond Technique: coal (fossil fuel) Creation date: 2015 Dimensions: 15x15x11cm Signed: [artist’s signature] 6/100 2015 Edition: 6/100 Author’s commentary: For my project Black Diamonds, I invited and involved unemployed ex-coal-miners in the production of coal sculptures. The engagement of ex-miners, threatened with social exclusion, who did not make it in the freemarket economy, was supposed to endow the project with social significance. Black Diamonds is not only a discourse with the post-industrial tradition of Upper Silesia, but also an attempt to address the question of the agency of art and the artist in initiating social action. The coal sculptures were sold in a stall made especially for the purpose. The profit made on the sale of sculptures was used for the production of the subsequent black diamonds.

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Radosław Szlaga (1979)

Title: Colonies from the cycle All The Brutes Technique: oil on canvas Creation date: 2015 Dimensions: 24 x 30 cm Radek Szlaga’s painting comes from his work cycle All the Brutes, which was inspires by his reading of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The artist revisited his school-reading after watching Copolla’s Apocalypse Now. The title of the cycle refers to Sven Lingquist’s book title, which was taken from one of the scene of the American film classic. The artist’s interest in the book was stimulated, one the one hand, by his stay in a capital of a former colonial empire – Brussels, the residence of the notorious Leopold II, responsible for the first colonial genocide; on the other, it stemmed from Szlaga’s profound identification with Joseph Conrad and his experience of artist-émigré from Poland and fascination with the story of Marlow and Kurtz written by Conrad in a foreign language. In his works, Szlaga elaborates his own experience of post-colonial reality. He speak from the perspective of an émigré suspended between various cultures. In All The Brutes, as in his entire work, he confronts others and his own visions of what might be there with what is here, what is natural with what is cultural. The painting donated to our auction juxtaposes national pride and enthusiasm for social action in Europe with the imperial ambition which they very often conceal.

Courtesy of Galeria Leto

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Szymon Szelc (1990)

Title: Long Road into Space – Dangerous Quest Technique: digital print on paper Creation date: 2015 Dimensions: 84 x 118 cm It is a fragment of the artist’s comics, his graduation work. The page represents a moment of an epic battle in space. The battle is waged by the main protagonist, who has embarked on a dangerous extra-terrestrial quest, bored with his routine, daily life. At the close of Long Road into Space – Dangerous Quest, the main protagonist concludes that “space in close-up doesn’t glitter as nicely as the night stars”. The author is the founder and co-editor of the comics magazine “Mydło.zin”.

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Małgorzata Szymankiewicz (1980)

Title: untitled 192 (Reams) Technique: acrylic on canvas Creation date: 2012 Dimensions: 102 x 122 cm Signed: Małgorzata Szymankiewicz 2012 Author’s commentary: Spontaneous Combustion The project metaphorically addressed theory and science of art, the co-existence of numerous discourses, provoking spontaneous combustions. The pieces are concerned with the problem of description and examine the capacities of various media that make any description possible. Incessant allusions to extant images or texts produce subsequent repetitions. Any attempt to translate ‘information’ entails its partial loss. In the project, I used various means of image-making (e.g. painting, analogue, digital photography, simulation, printing). Each piece traces their formal affinities. Each piece is a fragmentary statement and needs to be complimented in another medium. In consequence, all the works created for the project are one another’s “commentary”. There is a striking, visual similarity in all the means of image-making, but I focused on the differences and incongruities, so each piece refers to completely different orders and meanings.

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Tomek Baran (1985)

Title: untitled Technique: gouache on paper Creation date: 2012 Dimensions: 138 / 113 cm Signed: Tomek Baran 2012 Works for which Tomek Baran is famous, or the canvas completely painted to a mirror finish, present his perversity in using the medium of painting, which has long been considered to be in crisis. However, Baran is far from conservatism in the medium. A painting is to him a regular object. With characteristic distance to his profession, he creates his works dispassionately, mechanically repeating painter’s gestures. The original approach gives his works an anxious autonomy, stemming from the traditionally modernism attempt to withdraw the artist’s self from his work. Baran’s works in their materiality turn out to be enchanting and terrifying objects. The work donated by the artist to our auction was also created as an effect of the mechanistic yoga. The repetition of painter’s gestures, resembling a printing press, breaks the artist’s emotional ties to his work. It is worth noting the traces of a cello-tape, helpful in gouache painting, disturbing the elegant composition. Accidental destruction have been accepted by the author with hardly any doubt.

The question remains: does the final outcome of his work is really indifferent to Tomek Baran?

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Marzena Ślusarczyk (1976)

Title: See the Sea Technique: acrylic and chalk on canvas Creation date: 2015 Dimensions: 97 x 130 cm Signed: Marzena Ślusarczyk 2015 „SEE THE SEA” The protagonist of Slusarczyk’s painting is a young woman. She usually turns her back to the viewer, looking into an indeterminate distance, while standing at her desk, by a board, at an open window. Sometimes, she is holding a colourful sticky note, or holds her gaze, licking a colourful lollypop. The girl in Ślusarczyk’s paintings does not show her face. At best, we can see part of her profile. She is a mystery to us. Is a peculiar self-portrait of the artist? Or does she represent gestures observed in other women? The answer is in the eye of the viewer. It is certain, however, that the artist paints her protagonist with a lot of wonder and affection, which also the viewers experience. Ślusarczyk is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk.

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Izabela Tarasewicz (1981)

Title: Human Roots Technique: pencil, watercolor on paper Creation date: 25 marca 2010 Dimensions: 32,5 x 40,5 cm Signed: „human roots” Izabela Tarasewicz 2010 Title: Anonymous Cave Technique: pen, tracing paper, paper Creation date: 28 marca 2010 Dimensions: 32,5 x 40,5 cm Signed: „anonimowa jaskinia” Izabela Tarasewicz 2010 Author’s commentary: […] I made a lot of notes on “the rite of passage” at the time – it was a turning point in my work.

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Grupa Twożywo

Title: Emanations of Weakness Technique: graphics, stencil Creation date: 1999 Dimensions: 60 cm x 64 cm Signed: twożywo 5/30 Edition: 5/30

This is one of the earliest dating works by Grupa Twożywo, which people would have stumbled upon in the streets of Warsaw in the 1990s. Since the mid-1990s, Mariusz Libl and Krzysztof Sidork have circulated synthetics messages combining text with simple visual forms of expression. Inspired by the aesthetics of youth subcultures and avant-garde art, mainly Constructivism, they have been creating stencil works, posters, sticker art, and murals to invade public space, the streets, the media, and art galleries. Their works have always been provocative by nature and touched upon contemporary society, politics, and arts in Poland and globally. Suffice it to mention a “prophetic” billboard called “Kiedy wreszcie będzie wojna?” [When War at Last?] (2001), which appeared shortly before 9/11.

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Eva Vermandel (1974)

Title: Alice and Vicky, Stroud Green z serii Water Technique: photographic print Creation date: 2015 Dimensions: 43 x 50 cm Signed: FIRST PROOF / [artist’s signature] / 10|12|15 Edition: unique Author’s commentary: It was shot in February 2015. Alice is my friend Vicky's daughter. She features in several photographs. It's part of a series called Water which is short for 'we stood with the light like water on our faces', a quote taken from the White Peacock by DH Lawrence. DH Lawrence is a huge influence on my work: there's strong parallels between his way of coping with change in the era of industrialisation and and how I try to deal with the ever faster changes in our time of digitisation. At the core of my work lies the desire to decommodify people/objects/landscapes. Since the onset of the internet everything has become a commodity, I struggle with that and want to find a way to counter that.

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Joanna Piotrowska (1985)

Title: Machine Technique: photographic print, print on Fuji mat paper Creation date: 2015 Dimensions: 141 x 116 cm Edition: unique How are you by Joanna Piotrowska is not the only work she has made in collaboration with Razem Pamoja Foundation in Mathare, Nairobi in 2015. Piotrowska photographed objects cut off from Mathare’s natural colour of red soil. She came up with an idea to introduce them onto white canvas. The machine for sharpening knives, presented at Kombucha exhibition at Bunkier Sztuki Gallery in Krakow, exemplifies her search for ontologically unclear situations that Piotrowska investigates in her art very much like in a postEnlightenment laboratory whose rationalist methodology was imperceptibly invaded by psychoanalysis of seemingly inanimate objects.

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Magda Lazar (1986)

Title: Painkillers from the series Real Objects Technique: photographic print, ink print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta 315 g paper Creation date: 2015 Dimensions: 50 cm / 40 cm Edition: 2/5 +1AP The photograph comes from Magda Lazar’s cycle Real Objects, first presented at the exhibition Keep Both Feet on the Ground at the BWA CAG Katowice. The artist photographed objects and useful devices made by her friend, Hermes, who years ago decided to limit his participation in civilisation to a bare minimum. Among many other objects that Magda photographed were e.g. storm matches made to be wind-proof, ash for bathing, a rescue knot, useful for building various constructions, and a balcony adapted to serve as a hayrack for horses that Hermes sometimes rides in the city of Krakow. Painkillers shows a pain-killing “herb”, raised by Hermes in the city outskirts, where he lives. Before taking the photograph, the artist sprinkled the herb on a window reflecting the sky. The title of the cycle is inspired by the writings of John Berger, who proposed the distinction into real objects and manipulation.

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Xavery Wolski (1988)

Title: Lil’ Faust Technique: modelling putty, water colour Creation date: 2015 Dimensions: 17 x 15 x 10 cm (figurine) Signed: WOLSKI 2016 The title Lil’ Faust is the protagonist of the non-existent film Lil’ Faust’s Walk. The aforementioned production is Xavery Wolski’s graduate work. In his script for the film, the author employed the classical motif of ‘the heroic quest’, very popular in screen-writing. It has been a myth-making technique for millennia. The fact was pointed out by the American anthropologist, Joseph Cambell, in The Hero of a Thousand Faces, which inspired such authors as George Lucas. Xavery Wolski in his non-existent film based on ‘Campbell’s recipe’, employed also the findings of psychoanalysis. His film can be animated by anyone in their own imagination.

The effort is supported by a model, a script and comics-like story-boards. The figurine donated by the artist to our auction represent the main protagonist of the imagination-animated film.

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Maria Loboda (1979)

Title: untitled from the series The Beasts Technique: photographic print, print on paper Creation date: 2013 Dimensions: 50 x 33 cm Edition: 2/5 + 1AP In the photographs from Maria Loboda’s series The Beasts, hands in black leather gloves strike stones in exploration. The artist, employing her characteristic method, which could be termed ‘contemporary archaeology’ and the practice of a ‘linguistic ready-made’, dialogues with the mythological context of the Temple of Debod in Madrid. Treating the temple as a cipher, she cast light on the palimpsest of meaning, an impressive and awe-inspiring history that she develops through the object in these photographs. The work was presented in 2014 at the exhibition Abracadabra|Disappear like this word at the Aleksander Bruno Gallery in Warsaw. (Aleksander Warzyniak)

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Ewa Zarzycka (1953)

Title: Brain of a Performance Artist Technique: ink on paper Creation date: 2016 Dimensions: 46,5 x 54 cm Signed: Ewa Zarzycka 10.01. 2016 Ewa Zarzycka belongs among the most significant Polish women performance artist; her medium is conversation and she aim at a regular contact with another human. Zarzycka speaks publically about her everyday life. At the same time, she draws attention to the equivocal nature of reality subject to our individual interpretations. She points out that the world is only some kind of imagining, whereas art is a regular activity making possible a safe passage through the world. In 2013, the artist participated in a series of meeting organised at Naturalny Sklepik in Krakow for the project Into Africa. Her involvement in the activities of the Razem Pamoja Foundation did not end there. This time she supported our charitable auction by donating a humorous chart which explains the functioning of a brain of a performance artist.

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Krzysztof Maniak (1990)

Title: 27.10.2015 Technique: photographic print, ink print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta 315 g paper Creation date: 2015 Dimensions: 73 x 103 cm Signed: Krzysztof Maniak, 2015 / Edycja 1+1AP Edition: 1+1AP Author’s commentary: One afternoon at the beginning of the last week of October, when the majority of my neighbours and friends were still at work, I decided to collect rose hips to make some wine. A pervading sense of emptiness could be felt on the hill where I lived on that day. Everything that moved in gentle wind and sharp sunlight that palely illuminated orange birch leaves and trembling blades of grass oscillated on the verge of illusion.

Everything was numb. (...)

With effort and intention put into collecting rose hips, the photograph I have taken in the process can be treated as a private performance of mine. At least for a moment. I do not take the whole thing for granted but as a way to get closer to the structure that intrigues me. Subtle penetration, violation, change of space, also in terms of colour. Admiration. This seemingly ordinary situation, which tends to be eccentric these days, has been transmogrified into a ritual reminiscent of the four seasons. More importantly, the act of collecting berries transforms into a dramatic event, whereas the beautified background becomes an arena for a struggle with wild terrain and equally wide rose hips, which remain untouched by traffic pollution.

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Monika Drożyńska (1979)

Titile: Pole of the Worst Kind Technique: embroidery on fabric Creation date: 2016 Dimensions: 32,5 x 42 cm Signed: MONIKA DROŻYŃSKA 2016 Author’s commentary: The work was made for Kamil, who I admire above all else. He is wise, lovely and funny. He is my friend, which I truly appreciate. It was also made for Orzeszek, even though I’ve recently been mad at him, but there’s no point in holding grudges. Love is all (Get it, Szymon?) Love for cross-stich, of course. The love helps me come up with another Fashion Trinket. How to say? A trinket that helps? Kisses.

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Grzegorz Zygier (1954)

Title: Krzyszek in the Technique of Undergarment Tailoring Technique: embroidery on paper Creation date: 2013 Dimensions: 31 x 22 cm Signed: KRYSZEK W TECHNICE KRAWIECTWA LEKKIEGO ZYGIER `2013 Grzegorz Zygier formed together with Adam Rzepecki, whose work has also been donated to our auction, the art group Stacja Pi. Stacje belongs among the artists who made up the 1980s nation-wide art movement, Kultura Zrzuty, based on the principle of self-less sharing of creativity outside the read of any institution. A significant inspiration for the movement was the late Jacek Kryszkowski. In 1986, the artist announced in private letters to his friends his unspectacular resignation from participation in culture. Zygier created Jacek’s profile in his favourite medium, extremely popular in Polish folk art.

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Zuzanna Janin (1961)

Title: Fight Technique: Technique: photographic print, foam board, video frame Creation date: 2001/2005 Dimensions: 40 x 83 cm Signed: [artist’s signature] / WALKA/FIGHT / 2001-2005 / A.P. / stop klatka/video stik

The first retrospective of Zuzanna Janin’s work, I Love You Too, was organised in 2001 at the Zachęta National Gallery in Warsaw. The title of the exhibition came from the project in which the artist contended in the boxing ring with the boxing champion, Przemysław Saleta. The project spawned the installation Walka and Ring [Fight and Ring], composed of a film and an actual boxing ring, which can be considered a summary of the artist’s work in the 1990s. The work donated by the artist to our action consists in frames from the film documenting the usual fight. Janin’s piece has grown to be deemed one of the finest artworks of Polish feminist art of the previous three decades. Fight was shown in the artist’s numerous solo and group exhibitions in Poland and abroad. In 2015, the installation was included in the collection of the National Museum in Krakow.

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Ludmiła Woźniczko (1985)

Title: untitled Technique: oil on canvas Creation date: 2015 Dimensions: 105 x 115 cm Author’s commentary: A TV screen, a button, a miniature + a light reflex, a supper at a table, a graph of coordinates, a “danger” sign, (fish, tree, river), Japanese torture, a table (“sky”-deep), deep-“sky” tree

86 z 92

Bogna Burska (1974)

Ttitle: Crystal Technique: photographic prink, ink print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta 315 g paper Creation date: 2010 Dimensions: 60 x 31 cm Blood was one of the frequent motifs in Bogna Burska’s art at the beginning of her career. Her well-known works of the period have a colour of blood appearing on the wall, painted over by the artist with her own hands. Her numerous exhibitions presented photographs of blood stains on the snow, or blood running in a thin streak towards the sea. The early stage of her artwork was completed by the artist in her cycle Crystals.

The cycle consist in photographs of blood stained by the artist on a window during a freezing cold winter. The ruby liquid froze, creating fascinating composition on the transparent surface of the window, lit up by sunlight.

The artist claims that the work was for her “a combination of beauty, sophistication and the so-called darkness […] these things meet and diffuse in one object and you can choose the one closer to you at a given moment”.

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Amanda Wieczorek (1990)

Title: Ignoring The Scenery Of Our Own Demise (from the series The Virtual Phantom) Technique: Digital collage, ink print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta 315 g paper Date: 2016 Dimensions: 55,8 x 76,2 cm Signature: A. Wieczorek 2016 Ignoring The Scenery Of Our Own Demise Edition: artist proof

Amanda Wieczorek has made this collage during the research residency at The Tatra Museum in Zakopane.

She was there to further explore Wladyslaw Hasior’s art and the region. Working in this magnificent institution she was delighted to find photos of the 19th century mountain explorers. She compared them with photos from her own archive of pornographic magazines from the 1970s. Her work is a fascinating story about love for the surrounding landscape.33,32x50cm

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Robert Kuśmirowski (1973)

Title: RS 24 Technique: lithography Date: 2015 Dimensions: 50 x 66 cm Signature: 49/50 2015 Kuśmirowski Robert Kuśmirowski’s work was commissioned by the organisers of the 13th Lyon Biennal in 2015. During the edition of the Biennal, artists co-operated with amateur curators and a graphics studio to create works subsequently presented in unusual places in the city space such as shops, workshops and other service facilities. Robert Kuśmirowski prepared a graphic work concerned with the phenomenon of resistivity.

Resistivity is the physical property of matter indicating the dependence of resistance on temperature. The property varies depending on a resistivity of a conductor, increasing, decreasing, and sometimes even equalling zero. Then the particular material can become a super-conductor. Kuśmirowski in his work demonstrates the instance of the electric current flowing through the resistivity of a human body. The artist draws attention to the fact that humans, just as any other matter, either accept, or reject energy. A free flow of energy is also sometimes possible.

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Jarosław Fliciński (1965)

Title: As soon as you begin to talk / Jak tylko zaczniesz mówić from the series Homemade Paintings Technique: oil and acrylic on canvas Creation date: 2010 Dimensions: 50 x 40 cm Signed: FLICINSKI / JUNE 2010 / AS SOON AS YOU BEGIN TO TALK Since 2010, Jarosław Fliciński has been living in the Portuguese village of Esteval. The choice of his place of residence and his return to painting are by no means accidental. Esteval is situated at the far end of the European continent, distant from the capitals of the (art) world, on geographic and cultural periphery. Suffice to invert the perspective, however, to see that it is situated at the beginning, where the ocean ends and the continent appears. The artists, after many years of working directly on the walls and creating there monumental, geometric compositions referring to the traditions of modernist Middle-Eastern Europe, encloses his entire experience in the frame of a painting and one created according to a completely different regime. The work donated by the artist to our auctions is one of the first painting created in Esteval in 2010 and one of his first works with an individual title, As soon as you begin to talk / Jak tylko zaczniesz mówić. It opens the entire series of Fliciński’s paintings which the artist entitled Homemade Paintings. It is a canvas covered solely with a line grid, resembling a sketch taken directly from his previous walls. Soon the surfaces of subsequent paintings in the series are covered with layers of paint spilling and covering what has once been painted. The paintings will have become thick not just with layers of paint, but also with emotions drained in them. Precisely due to the emotions which entered the painting, and the working technique – return to painting and the fact that the paintings are created in a comparatively very isolated house – the artist calls them Homemade. The word “house/home” re-surfaces once more as CASA COSMOS, the name given to his entire Portuguese project.

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Editors: Dominik Kuryłek, Kamil Kuitkowski, Bartosz Przybył Ołowski Text authors: the artists, Dominik Kuryłek, Bartosz Przybył Ołowski Translations: Piotr Mierzwa and Bartosz Sowiński, Karolina Kolenda Graphic design: Kamil Kuitkowski Photographs: Paweł Dudziak Cover: Piotr Błachut The publication accompanies the charitable auction Artwork Auction. Learning, Acting, Sharing Pre-auction exhibitions: Bookstore | Exhibition, ul. Józefińska 9, Kraków, 13 – 20 January 2016 CCA Ujazdowski Castle, ul. Jazdów 2, Warszawa, 24 – 27 January 2016 Auction: CCA Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, 27 January 2016, 19.00 Organiser: The Razem Pamoja Foundation www.pamoja.pl www.ksiegarniawystawa.pl In co-operation with: Aleksandra Idler, Piotr Błachut, Marta Błachut, Paweł Dudziak, Martyna Sobczyk, Anna Batko, Alicja Wysocka, Joanna Piotrowska, Rafał Wąsikowski, Szymon Cisek.

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