Marek Wodzisławski – Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art

• Extreme beauty: other vision optics

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“. . . and although your brain twisted, like the horn of a ram,

Nothing drips of blue eyes.”

Joseph Brodsky

• Can beauty be extreme?
  • POV[1] is a show that deals comprehensively with the experience of other vision. The eye is an omniscient narrator here, but also an irrational subject and consumer of sensations. Searching for extreme aesthetics, the artist tests aggressive visuality. Inspired by representations of digital streams – shocking images of violence, pornography, dismembered body – he identifies them with an iconography of fantasies. Moreover, he himself is unable to look away from them, his eyes being wide open, the radical closeness fecundating him.
• Optic-nerve damage, monochromacy, retinal detachment, cataract – these and similar disorders reveal the physical limit of contact. Is it possible to break through the membrane of the Other’s gaze? In his projects, Wodzisławski makes use of animal bodies or body parts. The animal being for him part Other, part alter ego, he finds in them a means of searching for a common identity as he approaches them in terms of the animal, bestial, twinned.
  • Reflective membrane, cut-off eyelids, cosmic cataract: the show’s protagonists bring into being a story about the eye and identity, cruelty and pleasure, impregnation and freezing.

• Text
  • Sergey Shabohin

[1] Acronym for “point of view.” Denotes a style in pornography where the camera operator is also one of the actors. By extension, a pornographic film representing the viewpoint of a person involved in sexual activity.