The Navel of the Dream

The Navel of the Dream / 11.04.2024 - 09.05.2024

On 12 April, the City Gallery launches a group exhibition titled “The Navel of the Dream”, showcasing art which narratively and formally turns towards the surrealist, symbolic and romantic. In the paintings, textiles, ceramic sculptures and objects displayed at the exhibition, Polish artists take different approaches to exploring the areas of magic, esotericism, spiritualism, fairy tales, oneirism, psychedelia, horror and mythology.

Young artists’ artworks, phantasmagorical and dreamy in their aura, are always rooted in the real. Touching upon the chimerical and the strange, the artists filter their own visions through their view on the contemporary world and its most burning issues. Above all, however, they creatively use the dreamy, fairy-tale-like and sometimes disturbing aesthetics to construct autobiographical, often very intimate and strongly emotive stories in paintings, sculptures and objects. They methodically bring together the outer and the inner world, thus juxtaposing the material reality with that which escapes materialisation.

Just like a dream, the art presented at the exhibition seamlessly incorporates the explicit and the implicit, the conscious and the unconscious, and the real with the imagined. It is like a rift, through which the artists can break free from the phantasm of contemporaneity without violating its defining vagueness and ambivalence. In this way, their work becomes akin to the eponymous Freudian navel of the dream – blocking all law of understanding, a mysterious, exitless point of dissolved boundaries where truth takes on the structure of fiction.

The creative output by the artists participating in the exhibition is conceptually inscribed in issues related to challenging simple, dualistic divisions. Hence, when looking at this art, the Freudian category of the uncanny/unhomely (unheimlich) imposes itself almost spontaneously. The term developed from its antonym (“canny/homely” – heimlich) and remains inextricably linked to it. This linguistic usus encapsulates the entire mystery of the uncanny, emphasising that in fact it is nothing new or alien to us – it has long been known to our psychic life but was banished from it through a process of repression. Moving fluidly between universes devoid of clear dividing lines and constantly balancing on the boundary between the real and the imaginary, the conscious and the unconscious, the overt and the covert, the artists patiently trace the manifestations of the uncanny and transpose them into their own art.

The exhibition at the City Gallery in Wrocław is thus an attempt to approach the eponymous navel of the dream, where the real begins its intricate transformation process and ultimately manifests itself in elements of the uncanny.

The exhibition is on view until 9 May 2024.

Curator: Katarzyna Zahorska

Engaged artists: Jędrzej Bieńko, Martyna Borowiecka, Krzysztof Gil, Natalia Kopytko, Paweł Olszczyński, Patrycja Piętka, Jan Porczyński, Agata Słowak, Justyna Smoleń, Sasza Wiktor, Milan Zientara.