Anywhere Out of the World- Part 1. Site-specific Summer

The concept of the international group exhibition Anywhere Out of the World was inspired by the title of Charles Baudelaire’s poems from the volume Paris Spleen (1989). This going ‘out of the world’, identical with the desire to experience or initiate a widely understood change, will be the subject of deliberations reflected in diverse artistic strategies represented by the invited artists. Three curatorial editions of the project unveiled in the summer season will take various forms across the area of the sculpture park in Orońsko, as well as inside the Chapel Gallery.

Part 1

Curator: Marta Wróblewska

Charles Baudelaire’s Paris poems from the end of the 19^th century resound with the feeling of paradoxical alienation in a large city, combined with lassitude, jadedness and anonymity in a crowd. In the poet’s days, this special melancholy was attributed to the mechanization and acceleration of life resulting from the industrial revolution and the development of early capitalism. At the beginning of the 21^st century we are only too familiar with it, additionally struggling with the still ardent armed conflicts and the repercussions of the global pandemic, which just recently halted the world for many months.

Journeys, both physical and mental ones, provided an antidote to the existential anxiety experienced by Baudelaire’s flâneur. Being in motion brought people closer to self-understanding equivalent to transcending the boundaries of one’s cognition. Functioning for almost 60 years as a sort of alternative space, the sculpture centre in Orońsko emerges as a destination for similar spiritual and intellectual peregrinations, a vital field of inquiries, where various creative energies cross one another. In this sense, it is close to some of the ideas inherent in Gilles Clement’s ‘Manifest of the Third Landscape’. The French botanist defines in it the territory inhabited by species unable to find their place anywhere else. Its reality based on the foundation of a symbiosis between man and nature, is identical rather to the state of mind and a shared collective consciousness. In this context, the works and artistic interventions produced in the Orońsko park by Igor Grubić, Dominika Skutnik, Małgorzata Żerwe, as well the duo LOCUS (Thale Fastvold and Tanja Thorjussen) represent a review of long-term, critical artistic strategies, concentrated around the development of the models of (co)existence mediated by art.

Thus, the journey Anywhere out of the World is not a simple withdrawal from a hostile context, but an attempt to find ‘another’ place facilitating confrontations which lead to breaking the limiting paradigms. A review of the remarkably poetic gestures, scattered around the Orońsko park, strives to reveal the potential of marginal areas and bolster the activities during which speaking various languages (also artistic ones) resembles a multidimensional and polyphonic exercise in empathy.