23 January – 27 March 2016
Opening: Friday, 22 January 2016, at 6 pm
Curator: Anna Smolak
Co-ordinator: Monika Smyła
The exhibition “The Stillness of Thought” at BWA Sokół Contemporary Art Gallery in Nowy Sącz is the first individual presentation in Poland of works by the Kosovan artist Sislej Xhafa. It has brought together the artist’s earlier works, complementing them with a new site‑specific piece. Sislej Xhafa combines art with the experience of space; as a result, the energy of specific locations is activated in confrontation with his works. This is as true about physical places – we are in a small town whose historic character has had a considerable impact on its contemporary identity – as about the mental spaces that overlap with them.
“Identity is subject to continuous mutation”, the artist once said, pointing to movement and relocation as instrumental in the shaping of value systems. The hybridity revealed in seemingly random juxtaposition of materials, meanings and forms, independent of their original affinity, purpose, and the place and time of their creation is Xhafa’s trademark and it accounts for the power of his works. Provocative yet refraining from sensationalism, critical but not didactic, poignant yet rich in nuance – Xhafa’s works, which stretch from objectivity to performativity, generate incessant movement. Movement is a condition of transition, understood both literally as a change of location but also as a shift in meaning, emotion and thought. “And here you are, bewildered and lost in a new prosaicness, a perspective in which near and far coincide.” the Belgian Situationist revolutionary Raoul Vaneigem wrote in his “The Revolution of Everyday Life.” At first glance, the objects and images spread randomly in space seem poignantly familiar: a photocopier, a cigarette, a lump of asphalt. However, the rules of engagement are not defined by their setting in mundanity but in their detachment from it. And it is precisely this kind of transition, which apparently ignores all limitations and habits that generates an infinite number of combinations of overlapping experiences and meanings.
The artist conducts his semantic operations with panache. He manoeuvres between the trivial and what has been marked with pathos, between the official and the marginalised, escaping unambiguous labels and categories. And although he seeks to avoid compromise, he leaves space for poetics, imagination and humour.
“The Stillness of Thought” is an exhibition without a common denominator. It is both about void and about accumulation, about exclusion and about appropriation. About how thought materialises in an object and how the object itself becomes a conduit for thought. This is an exhibition that does not make any political statements, yet it is profoundly political – complemented as it is by the moment in which it occurs.
http://www.bwasokol.pl/index.php/pDocId/202/pCmd/1/pMenuId/2/langVer/2
