Habitat

PRZEprojekt: Open Call Intervention in SpaceCoCA in Torun, 2013documentation: Tytus Szabelski

The relationship between artworks and art galleries that put them on display can be described as symbiotic, as a close association of two organisms beneficial for either of them. There is no art without the institutions that exhibit it; the institutions make no sense without artists and their creation. The principles underlying the symbiosis are applied by means of advanced exhibiting systems, promotional enterprises and complex works. However, the profit-to- loss ratio in the relationship is rarely easy to be determined.

This organic poetics of coexistence seems to have driven the project prepared for PRZEprojekt by Olga Szczechowska. The artist will intervene in the space of the Centre of Contemporary Art; the results may prove hardly perceptible or disturb the solemnity of the institution, they may also coexist with the architecture of the place in an unapparent and untypical fashion. Natural forms will be translated into objects whose “habitat” will be provided by the gallery space. The outcomes of the artist’s intrusion will include artifacts, smuggled – as it were – in passing, oscillating between the rational and the irrational, crawling all around the architecture interrupting its rhythm.

Habitat tells the story of where art belongs. The pure space of the monumental white cube is going to act as a host for artistic microbes; it is going to provide a platform for a discussion with the institution. If you decide to view the show, you will find yourself following trails left by the artist all over the gallery. Outsiders will also have a chance to come across one of the artist’s hidden interventions. Their ambiguity and subtlety may reveal themselves when least expected. In genuine admiration of daily life, in which the organic and the inorganic become one, the artist offers us an opportunity to experience the symbiosis around art.