Andrzej Tobis - A-Z (EDUCATIONAL CABINETS)

In 1954 in Leipzig Bildworterbuch Deutsch und Polnisch / A German-Polish Illustrated Dictionary was published - a remarkable compendium of knowledge about the world at that moment, and at the same time a bold attempt to classify and describe concrete reality by means of entries, indexes, and charts. To render the dictionary more ordered, its authors introduced 15 parts to cover various domains of knowledge: from a political system, through economy, culture, to the human body and botany. The dictionary contains numerous language pitfalls and weaknesses in translation, which are the source of surprising information for a careful reader. The publication became a starting point for Andrzej Tobis in creating a special archive of images.The artist searches the territory of Poland for visual equivalents of the dictionary entries and photographs them. Each image of the series is assigned with an entry in Polish and German along with an index number. The dictionary itself is nothing more than an excuse for the continuing search for the next entry and descriptions of the world around the artist. The photographs are created with an unusual care and a sense of humour and unveil the slippage contained in the words and their meanings, in the photographed images and the concepts assigned to them. These numerous shifts, ambiguities and undertones constitute the greatest value in the project. Tobis does not arrange situations, he just records his observed daily reality. The melancholy contained in the images presented is also very surprising, invoking nostalgic memories of a time that has passed. The exhibition at CoCA is the largest presentation of the project so far.

Factory 23.10.2009 - 17.01.2010 artists: Mariusz Waras (M-city) / Krzysztof Topolski (Arszyn) curator: Daniel Muzyczuk

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.
Bob Black, The Abolition of Work

The collaboration between a visual artist and an experimental musician has resulted in a most interesting and thought-provoking artistic project – a spectacular site-specific installation, made for the biggest room at the CoCA in Torun. For both artists, working on the project was a novelty. Mariusz Waras, an artist who has so far found artistic expression in two-dimensional murals, now constructs a huge, three-dimensional object; Arszyn supplies it with a special interface for interactive involvement of the viewer, offering each and everyone the possibility of creating an individual soundtrack. The vast, engine-driven factory is accommodated in an institution dedicated to contemporary art, like an ironic comment on the mechanisms of the production of artifacts and cultural policy. The Factory produces nothing, it serves no useful purpose, but it stirs the senses and its huge dimensions emphasize the transformations that contemporary culture is undergoing. This factory needs no workers. The engines that keep it going require little attention. The ghostly nature of the installation evokes a vague sense of danger and forecasts the end of physical work.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication with texts by Alain Badiou, Bob Black and Daniel Muzyczuk.

A-Z (EDUCATIONAL CABINETS)
Andrzej Tobis
Kurator: Joanna Zielinska