Perfect World

We invite you to a space where Katarzyna Wyszkowska has created an installation reminiscent of a dollhouse—a place where we can play pretend to be masters of our own destinies and try our hand at constructing new worlds, orders, and rules. Imagine a graph: on the vertical axis, we measure the utopian potential of art: dream worlds and alternative orders with a touch of the surreal. On the horizontal axis, we measure its ability to resonate with society: the accessibility of its language, its comprehensibility, and its potential to cut to the core of different groups. What might such a curve look like? Does art have the power to fall on fertile ground and transform the world, or will it fade away into the noise of everyday life? After all, contemporary art is sometimes nothing more than a whim of those who can afford to look at it. However, I forgot one variable transforming our flat graph into a three-dimensional image—time. It is precisely this variable which shows how trends change: ideas once pushed to the margins return after years and become the foundation for change. And the graph itself? It resembles a white square through which runs a thin, irregular, pulsating line. Do you remember the movie Cube (1997)? A group of people wander through a labyrinth made up of identical cubes, with fatal consequences. Some die, some have their faces sliced open by a metal grid, others ponder the meaning of life—not just within the mad dream called Cube, but in general. This image came back to me while reading Brian O’Doherty and his theory of the “white cube”. As if being trapped in a labyrinth was not enough—we also wander from gallery to gallery, from one white square to the next. And perhaps the scariest thing about it is not the labyrinth itself, but the technology: cold, precise, inevitable. The kind that renders a person seemingly powerless against the system. What draws me most to Wyszkowska’s work is its handcrafted quality. The scent of paint and the richness of detail embody time—hours of labor imprinted on every surface. A “signature” emerges from the forms and shapes—tiny imperfections revealing we are looking at something created by human hands. We are looking at work. Yes, work. And it is precisely work that becomes one of the key themes of this body of work: like creation and production, like consumption and prosumption, like a way in which we coexist—including in an ecological sense. Fair work, regulated work, shared work. The world she has—literally—built for us is founded on the desire for work, which occupies a significant part of our lives, to be good and just. That it does not kill us, but enable us to live. And in a futuristic vision: that one day it would disappear entirely—that machines would work for us, and we could live in a world of equality and abundance, according to the principle: to each according to their needs. In his 1908 book Red Star, Alexander Bogdanov painted a vision of life on Mars. We wander across the Red Planet, visit museums, read poetry, and view art. Everything is shared, egalitarian, immaterial, and accessible. This vision took root surprisingly quickly in the avant-garde movements of the 1920s: Dada claimed that anyone could be an artist, Surrealism made art accessible to everyone, and the Bauhaus brought abstraction down from its pedestal and into everyday life. All these movements were deeply human—despite their fascination with a mechanized future. And they all emerged in the wake of the catastrophe of World War I, when killing had become an industry. Try to picture our graph again and pull the red curve out of it like a shoelace. What remains? A cold, white square—just as ambivalent as technology itself. A space to be filled and a question: Will the visions of a better world which Wyszkowska draws ever become reality? Or will it take a turning point—historical tension, a moment of upheaval—to make that happen? Perhaps Fully Automated Luxury Communism will never become a human experience, but rather a whim of machines that will one day, with feigned plaisir and without understanding, observe human art in museums open twenty-four hours a day. Perhaps. But bitter defeatism has never been my thing. Instead of a dystopia with a capital D—as in “doomer”—I prefer, with a touch of millennial delulu (also starting with D), to imagine better scenarios. I am practicing for the future: I am thinking not only of my children and their children, but also of society as a whole, which sooner or later will hear voices calling for a better tomorrow—like the one that resounds here, at the exhibition.