“Don’t romanticize”

23.02-10.03.2022

Artists: Paulina Bijoch, Jeremi Czyż, Marcelina Gorczyńska, Joanna Klikowicz, Marta Matysiak, Lena Pierga, Aleksandra Raszka, Adam Siwek, Kuba Stępień, Piotr Szczęsnowicz, Aneta Wieczorek oraz Weronika Zalewska

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The reality in which we function affects us and becomes an inseparable part of ourselves. It has to be responded to, interpreted, given a shape to. The need to share impressions about the reality is engraved in the way we think about ourselves. It also determines the  form of self-constitution and compulsive confirmation of one’s own presence. Everyone is supposed to find their own personal form and the way to narrate and communicate their needs and impressions.

Instead of focusing on a dialogue with a medium itself the exhibition ‘Don’t Romanticize’  seeks  its assistance in trying to tell something about the reality and the current social situation. What it reveals is a sense of alienation and loneliness rendered even more burdensome by sanitary regimes associated with the Covid 19 pandemic – the regimes which tend to impose  the imperative of exploring and reporting the surrounding world via electronic media alone. While being forced to experience  the ‘remoteness’ of the reality we are also confronted with a sense of danger, coerced to keep distance and suffer alienation. What follows in consequence is an abhorrence of  landscape, nature, interpersonal relations and the immediate surroundings. 

What does the title ‘Don’t Romanticize’ refer to? 

First of all, it means the crudeness of vision, an attempt to convey a message seemingly free from any intense emotional dominance. It shows an endeavor to use the medium of photography and film in order to speak about the current situation and current feelings without burdening the events in question with any emotional stigma at the very level of the form itself. The point is also to refer to topics like  landscape and man, tolerance and longing which are inborn in our genre while leaving the final narrative to the recipient. No beautification. No romanticizing. The more transparent, more distanced  the message  the stronger its appeal. 

Like an offer we do not have to accept. 

The exhibition ‘Don’t Romanticize’ is a presentation of 12 artists working within the Visual Relations Studio, Faculty of Media Art of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. A workshop which offers a platform for discussion about the world as well as room for the development of thought and for building a responsible message. A place where the prevailing belief is that being a creator today consists primarily in reflection on the reality that concerns and affects us. It is a place where it becomes crucial to understand creativity as a state of mind, as a readiness for dialogue, as a tool for awakening consciousness and  a form of establishing contact with the surrounding reality by returning to the study of the environment; and also as a way to analyze the rules observed in it which impose themselves with greater force the more objective they seem.  Although objective they are not.

Curator of the exhibition: Professor  Prot Jarnuszkiewicz 

Exhibition coordinator: Agata Witczak

Graphic design: Renata Motyka