Adjacency

Rondo Art Gallery in Katowice, 21st May – 21st July 2024

Participants: Alicja Bielawska, Agnieszka Brzeżańska, Kaitlin Bryson, Grzegorz Hańderek, Petra Janda, Richard Long, Cecylia Malik, Justyna Mędrala, Silvia Noronha, Michał Smandek, Saša Spačal, Jakub Stelmach, Maria Stokłosa, Mikołaj Szpaczyński, Iza Tarasewicz, Isolde Venrooy

Walking lines in the field, Richard Long unseals the traditional approach to sculpture. Its scope spreads over kilometres, including the wanderer’s body, and other species whose trajectories it crosses, topographical relief, atmospheric conditions. Observing the landscape slowly, at walking pace, makes you aware of the network of environmental dependencies. It cumulates traces of scorching sun, sweat, dust, pollen, involuntarily deposited on the surface of your skin.

In the “Adjacency” exhibition, such pacing the distance out with your own body has become an impulse to take a look at an archive of moves, performed by the invited artists within their private mappings. Most of them have long studied the matter of the earth, making attempts at reading it. In their works, the ground appears as the effect of crumbled hierarchies, residue of diverse lifeforms, welded in the subsequent layers. It contains the record of changing coastlines of old seas, trails of former riverbeds, stories of volcanic eruptions, droughts and glaciations. Here, the stratigraphy of terrain is a register of departed processes, a repository of encoded texts, bearing traces of individual and generational biographies.

Observation thereof takes the form of phantom geology as a method of studying time, liberated from the shackles of procedures, characteristic of this discipline. It appears as a laboratory of metaphors. Immediate surroundings and close relationships, conglomerates and condensations, become foundations of thinking about the reality through the prism of the notion of flux, exchange, symbiosis. Rather than fostering the conviction about the superagency of homo sapiens based on control and distance, they offer a vision of a harmonious consonance, in which the common rhythm can be found. Its healing power relies upon a set of moves, inspired by the dynamics of the weave. The pursuit of clear-cut divisions is replaced by the superior principle of permeation. The collection of forgotten choreographies is based on the category of viscosity, defining individuals through the prism of their attachment to others by means of a specialised set of legs, whiskers, tentacles, suckers and hooklets.

Each component of the title adjacency practice contains a rudiment of activity, waiting to happen. It encourages mapping of the future, based on potential alliances and connections. Richard Long’s walking turns out to be a meditation of the body, wrestling its own materiality. As an activity, it offers a soothing vision of catharsis of imagination, focussed on a seemingly simple task: taking subsequent steps connecting you to the earth.

Curator: Marta Lisok