curator: Piotr Lisowski
exhibition: 21 Mar – 4 May
Piotr Blajerski’s exhibition Wandering Among Other Realizations of Life is a speculative vision of building a community free from speciesism. The artist looks at the processes that shape biological life, recording that which usually goes unnoticed. He films and photographs the animals encountered on his path, looking at their existence and death. He establishes a specific kind of relationship, stepping into the role of a sentient witness who shares his personal experience of crossing the horizon of vision and empathy.
These encounters, often provoked by chance or curiosity, become a field of changing optics in our perception of the world as a human-dominated space. Piotr’s working method is not so much about documenting, but recording the situations in which he finds himself and of which he naturally becomes a part. He steps back and refrains from commentary in order to emphasize the relationship with the encountered beings. The protagonists of his project explore unknown spaces, search for food, copulate, move and die. As subjects to life processes, they form a community of beings – an ecosystem co-created by human and non-human beings (animals, plants and microorganisms).
A change in our approach to living beings occurred in parallel to the development of posthumanist thought. Transcending the idea of anthropocentrism entailed a critical analysis of the previous, traditional approach to animals, both in art and in non-artistic matters. Today, we live in a time when the community of other beings is taking on special importance. The looming specter of the “Anthropocene Era” and the deepening climate emergency force a fundamental shift in our thinking about the planet and its ecosystems. Reflections that provide answers to the questions of how to live as part of an interspecies community seem crucial. How to caringly build an environment in which everything functions on the basis of intertwined relationships?
In the exhibition, Piotr Blajerski adopts an empathy-based strategy, which he puts into practice through observation and wandering, both physically and mentally. The featured works are permeated by a palpable tension between the process of slow annihilation and passing away and the vision of building a community seen from a post-anthropocentric perspective.
Here, annihilation is seen in terms of extinction – a process of disappearance of species, planetary change brought about by human activity. However, it is the community that offers the opportunity to establish relationships as the basis of biological life realized in different ways. The artist sees post-anthropocentrism as a constructive way of thinking, which simultaneously rejects an eschatological attitude and expresses a humility that goes against anthropocentric egoism.
Piotr’s practice, free from distance and objectification, is intended to trigger empathy and a critical look at our habitual perception and understanding of another life. The motif of wandering, highlighted in the exhibition title, is an invitation to slowly discover that which usually remains hidden. It provides an impulse for a sensitive gaze that breaks the social order in which non-human persons function only as resources. In the exhibition, they are agents as important as humans.
Exhibition guide
Silent night
Piotr Blajerski (b. 1980) has graduated from the Faculty of Graphics and Media Arts of the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław. He creates video, photography and sound installations, as well as performative community events. His work explores the possibility of expanding the boundaries of cognition and consciousness as well as individual freedom in the current social conditions and complex power dynamics, together with the narratives that support them; it envisions a future in which current ideological certainties no longer apply, promoting instead a post-anthropocentric perspective that broadens the limits of community and empathy. In 2023, he began doctoral studies at the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. He lives and works in Wrocław.
photo: Archive of Artist
Piotr Lisowski is an exhibition curator and art historian, author, editor of publications and independent researcher of contemporary art. He is the artistic director of 66P Subjective Cultural Institution. From 2017 to 2022 he was worked at Wrocław Contemporary Museum, which he managed in 2020. Previously, from 2007 to 2016, he was curator and supervisor of the CCA Toruń collection, as well as co-founder of the independent GALERIA MIŁOŚĆ (2014–2017). He works as a lecturer at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń and teaches the Art Mediation course at the Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław.
photo: Małgorzata Kujda
The 66P team and collaborators
Organisation, production and implementation: Renata Jarodzka, Rafał Jarodzki, Anna Krukowska, Piotr Lisowski, Mirek Łuckoś, Mirek Chudy, Marta Strzępek, Tomek Serediuk, Marcin Caliński, Danuta Krzywicka, Teresa Hajłasz-Golonka, Bartosz Gierczak, Michał Czapliński, Patrycja Ucieklak
Promotion: Magda Kotowska
Graphic design: Kinga Gralak
Translations: Iuliia Lytsevych, Karol Waniek