Villa Straylight. Exhibition Trilogy

U–jazdowski / Program / Exhibitions / Villa Straylight. Exhibition

29/01-22/05/2016

exhibition

"The Villa Straylight", said a jeweled thing on the pedestal, in a voice like music, "is a body grown in upon itself, a Gothic folly. Each space in Straylight is in some way secret, this endless series of chambers linked by passages, by stairwells vaulted like intestines, where the eye is trapped in narrow curves, carried past ornate screens, empty alcoves...."
- (William Gibson, Neuromancer)
Villa Straylight is an exhibition trilogy devoted to the art of Michał Frydrych, Piotr Grabowski and Kuba Bąkowski.
- The project is divided into three subsequent chapters. Each chapter of Villa Straylight has been prepared by one of the three artists and has the form of an independent project.
Each participant proposes his own poetics and uses his own, original creative strategy. Frydrych, Grabowski and Bąkowski will act on a common platform: the space that will be organised by each of them in line with their artistic discourses; as well as the set of notions, issues and problems that are evoked by the figure of Villa Straylight chosen for the show’s title.
- Villa Straylight is a fictional place created by the pioneer of cyberpunk, William Gibson, in his Sci-Fi novel Neuromancer. Villa is a mysterious residence in the last sector of the Freeside orbital space station - a hybrid between a cosmic Las Vegas, a free harbour and a holiday resort. Villa is a maze hiding a collection of weird artefacts. Finally, it is a place haunted by artificial intelligence - a self-conscious code fighting to achieve full personal identity.
The exhibition trilogy by Frydrych, Grabowski and Bąkowski is not a gallery adaptation of Gibson’s prose. Nonetheless, Gibson’s Villa has provided them with a set of inspirations, notions and images that define the poetics and the field of explorations carried out within individual chapters and the entire project. The above-mentioned set of notions includes the concept of space, where limits between the material and the virtual become blurred, as well as the limits between objects, notions and information. Moreover, this set includes the belief in the “artificial intelligence” of the language (programming codes, informal speech, artistic idioms) – the language we speak that also “expresses” the speaker, because the language has its own agenda and identity, independently of who is using it. The artists participating in this exhibition and Gibson’s cyberpunk spirit share a hacker- or pirate-like approach to knowledge and information, as well as an ambivalent relation with technology that fascinates and unsettles them at the same time. All three of them, though each one in a different way, refer to science fiction as a field that allows to recognize what’s real through allegories and imagination of the (im)possible.
- Michał Frydrych, Piotr Grabowski and Kuba Bąkowski practice artistic creation as a special cognitive procedure. They are painters, sculptors, film makers, event initiators and constructors of artistic machines. However, they are also - or maybe even most of all - researchers, investigators, hackers who capture images and information, searching for links between them and providing shapes and forms to those connections. In Villa Straylight, thinking and intellectual speculations have direct, material consequences; thoughts become physically present within the area of discourse, just like objects in space.