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After more than a decade, Marcin Berdyszak returns to the City Gallery with his one-man exhibition. Most pieces on the show receive their premiere in the Wrocław gallery.
The title of the exhibition – angor animi – is a term taken from medical nomenclature. It refers to the uncontrolled conviction of being in a state of dying, manifested by psychological and physical symptoms. Berdyszak, however, transfers it to the ground of social deliberations and, following the Polish philosopher, political scientist and philosopher Leszek Koczanowicz, uses it as a general diagnosis of contemporary reality. In this context, in the artist’s reflection angor animi appears as a certainty of imminent annihilation representative of entire modern communities or even nations.
In this exhibition, Berdyszak, explores fear embedded in various cultural, social and civilisational aspects. In doing so, the artist takes into account both the general, supra-individual dimension of anxiety consuming modernity and his own subjective perspective. Thus, Berdyszak discovers the category of fear in the context of multidirectional narrative threads he has taken up over decades of his creative practice. These concern issues such as the social and civilisational consequences of capitalist culture, rapid processes of revising and rendering obsolete meanings and values, the phenomenon of culture taking over the content potential of nature, and the eternal question of the passage of time in a reality that is increasingly resistant to passing, since it is technicised and digitalised.
The artist’s multi-layered reflections on fear, however, resound strongly with current events related to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. Ruminating on the war happening over our eastern border, Berdyszak decides this time to replace the banana, his indispensable artistic attribute, with the motif of a star. The symbol, in pop-culture associated with quality and prestige, in the artist’s latest works becomes the carrier of illusion about security and value, as well as an ideological medium for social dormancy. For, as the artist emphasises: The star is now replacing that famous banana peel on which we have all slipped.
The exhibition is on display until 5 November.
The official opening of the exhibition on 6 October at 6:00 PM.
Curator: Katarzyna Zahorska.
