curatorial cooperation: Aleksy Wójtowicz
exhibition: 16.03-22.04.2023
The exhibition consists of a series of works created by Adam Kozicki over the last few months. The featured paintings are connected by the theme of the border, with particular emphasis on the situation on the Polish-Belarusian border. In the wake of the humanitarian crisis and the imposition of a state of emergency in the area, this particular piece of territory became attractive to the media for a brief time – but not for long enough to sustain attention in the face of the Russian aggression against Ukraine, which resulted in a mass migration of people across Poland’s eastern borders. These two starkly different examples of borderland control prompt us to rethink what the border is today – as a philosophical, sociological and geopolitical concept. However, such theoretical considerations from the comfortable and safe distance are not enough.
The border, i.e. a line that is not physically there, is a very real space within which biopolitics (selecting lives perceived as worth saving) and necropolitics (responsible for condemning to death those who are not deemed worthy of living) work side by side. The fact that this very space combines these two approaches is hardly surprising – this is its function. The border conceives of “illegal” and “legal” people in strict accordance with the current needs of capital flows and the short-term profitability of certain gestures and practices in the face of the meanderings of migration policy (both local and continental). From this perspective, even humanitarianism contributes to the construction of an anthropological border by wielding the power to both humanise and animalise – where the latter affects all those who have not experienced the grace of the former1 .
I Wake Up in a Place Where No Human Being Can Live is a series of paintings addressing experiences that have been driven out and erased from media coverage: barbed wire and walls, unlawful deportations, graveyards of bodies of people who were deemed unworthy of living – victims of starvation, hypothermia, drowning and tortures. They are depictions of places under a state of emergency, spaces where fate worse than death and heroic acts of help coexist. Don’t expect painterly realism, for it is powerless in such a situation – rather, a compounded world, impossible-to-imagine from a distanced perspective. A world in which subjectivity and the sharp edges of objects are blurred; which forever gets bogged down in mud and disintegrates into atoms with the melt.
The paintings are accompanied by statements of people who support the activities of Grupa Granica – an informal network of assistance to migrants, which operates in the Belarus-Poland border region.
[1] Zob. Ł. Moll, Granice europejskiego uniwersalizmu w perspektywie poststrukturalistycznej filozofii politycznej, Uniwersytet Śląski, 2018, s. 102-103.
Adam Kozicki (b. 1992, Warsaw) has graduated from the Faculty of Graphics and the Faculty of Painting of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Winner of the mBank Award (UpComing, 2021) and the third prize in the 45th edition of the Bielska Jesień Biennale (2021). In 2022, his works were included in the collective exhibition The Discomfort of Evening and the 14th edition of the WARSAW IN CONSTRUCTION festival – “Streetfight” at the Museum of Modern Art. He is close to the idea of (post-)art, in which social engagement is permanently combined with creative activism.
Exhibition guide
organizer and producer of the exhibition: 66P Subjective Institution of Culture
Media Patrons: Le Monde Diplomatique, NN6T, Magazyn Kontakt, Pismo Artystyczne FORMAT