‘Notes on Staying Calm’ — Adam Laska i Piotr Macha
You are very welcome to come to the opening of the exhibition on the 8th November at 6 pm.
Adam Laska and Piotr Macha have not yet launched their manifesto, and this is why they get away with touching on subjects that seem completely unrelated to one another. Without the need to safeguard their positions, they can freely roam the swampy area of pop-culture, as if it were a rubbish dump, in frantic search of motives, to combine them later into their works. Thanks to this, their works include such important objects as cranes, a Host-made origami, portraits made from wrapping foils, soap or bubblegum sculptures made with fingernails and snowflakes made from bones.
In the contexts of the realisations presented within Notes on Staying Calm, they look like boys who have watched too much tv. They do not seem to show any consideration for the reality-imposed rules. For these two, there are no unfeasible tasks. Macha makes a trailer for a non-existent 1950s Polish movie about an attack of gigantic Colorado beetles, giving it a typical title Bloody Potato-Lifting. Laska invents a figure of an eccentric stay-at-home scientist, whose knowledge of the world comes solely from movies, and uses his arms to create a prototype of an aurora light emitter.
Lessons on dissected fear, which Macha and Laska teach their viewers, are based on a mixture of charming yet useless narrations that verge on fraudulent art and spellbinding tv. In their case, continuous revolving around the subjects of apparitions, special effects and phantoms makes reality less binding and converts it into a sort of game, in which actions and choices become more and more replaceable and simulatory. As Adam Laska put it: I like it when I leave the cinema feeling I could give a good thrashing to the roughest thugs in town.
Curator: Marta Lisok
