Opening: Friday, October 20th, at 6:00 till 10:00 pm

The exhibition runs: October 20th — December 2nd

curated by: Maria Rubersz

Working with objects from the past, the archivist opens them up to the future. Karol Radziszewski has taken on the Foksal Gallery Archive—photographs, narratives, and the very identity of this avant-garde gallery. By painting over some iconic photographs, such as Tadeusz Kantor’s “Raft of the Medusa”, he extracts alternate histories lurking in those all-too-familiar pictures. He also unearths some quite unknown and unpublished photographs, such as Eustachy Kossakowski’s report on the Neo-Neo group. In the amusing actions of this artist duo, he finds a scene that summons to mind a feminist piece by Natalia LL—”Consumer Art” —which was created several years after this bit of reportage found in Foksal. In one of a thousand photographs of “The Dead Class”, a Kantor play that was meticulously documented, he extracts some clenched bare buttocks, recalling Krzysztof Niemczyk and his queer actions of the 1970s.

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication that also includes reproductions of actions for the camera directed by Radziszewski. He made use of some uncertainties surrounding Allan Kaprow’s visit to Foksal Gallery in 1976, wherein the latter alleged refused to agree to perform the happening he had planned. The archive does contain suggestions of another scenario, however. Radziszewski used these scraps of information and Kaprow’s original instructions tucked away in a file to introduce some nude male bodies to the Foksal Gallery Archive, thus altering the perception of the collections of the cradle of Polish Conceptualism once and for all. Texts in the catalog by Michał Grzegorzek and Maria Rubersz.

Karol Radziszewski “Raf of the Medusa” – the graphic uses a photography by Eustachy Kossakowski from the Foksal Gallery Archive.

This project has been financed by the City of Warsaw and BWA Warszawa.