Artist in a Time of Hopelessness

Artist in a Time of Hopelessness, 2013
BWA Awangarda, Wrocław
Group exhibition
7.12.2013-14.01.2014
Curator: Zbigniew Libera

In October 2012, an open call was held for the project Studio of Masters: Curator Libera. Six artists were selected from 78 applicants, including Maryna Tomaszewska. They worked with Zbigniew Libera for a year on the exhibition Artist in Times of Hopelessness. The latest Polish Art  that took place at BWA Awangarda in Wrocław in December 2013.
It was a process piece created over the course of a year. Libera’s method consisted of meetings between him and the artists, personal conversations, phone calls, emails and negotiations with the institution. All this was done in order to make the artists’ actions and the problems they pointed out, the real subject of the collaboration. Guarding against reductive interpretations of the activities of his subjects, Libera did not aim for easy categorizations. He avoided reductive terminology and quick associations. He spoke of the difficulty of mediating between the documentations created as a result of this process and the viewer, who had to put in his own effort to benefit from this communication, as they grappled with the image of Poland: its religiosity, its problems and its condition in reality.
Artists who abandoned their own egos, illusions and cultural handicaps, encountering reality in order to be better understood, demanded the same from those who came to the gallery. This was an exhibition without physical works, it was a return to the source of human communication – conversation.