Shadow Architecture exhibition

SHADOW ARCHITECTURE.
LAVATORIES AND BAZAARS

Exhibition identity, Contribiution

Shadow Architecture consists of elements displaced from the official discourse such as toilets, men’s public lavatories, bazaars and street stalls. Their form and place within the urban space serve as a mirror reflecting the economic and cultural development of a given society as well as its relation to physicality, rituals and politics.
Paraphrasing one of the commentaries on the famous sculpture-urinal by Marcel Duchamp titled Fountain, “Art is something you piss on,” one can say that we ignore everything we don’t understand or which we wish to push out of our awareness.
The exhibition Shadow Architecture is a collage of spatial structures such as bazaars, stalls, public lavatories and toilets which, hidden away by the city in shameful recesses or on the peripheries as “unclean forms,” here they emerge from the shadows like urban fetishes: Parliaments of Bazaristan, Monuments to Trade, Museums of Ablution, Temples of Contemplation.
This exhibition and the book which accompanies it are an opportunity to devise a script for the future in which sacrum mixes with profanum, and that which is filthy, illegal and taboo returns, elevated in honor and glory. The exhibition will be accompanied by the second volume of the book Shadow Architecture, edited by Aleksandra Wasilkowska, the exhibition’s curator and architect. It will feature texts by Zofia Krawiec and Slavs and Tatars, poetry by Andrzej Szpindler, comics by Maciej Sieńczyka, Anna Kaplińska’s interviews with vendors and lavatory attendants, and documentation created by vendors, artists and architects of Bazaristan.

Featured Artists: Tania Bruguera, Pablo Bronstein, Olaf Brzeski, Maciek Chorąży, Oskar Dawicki, Teresa Gierzyńska, Jerzy Goliszewski, Agnieszka Kurant, Krzysztof Kaczmarek, Michał Kałużny, Zofia Krawiec, Maciej Landsberg, Mariusz Maciejewski, Agnes Mohlin, Noviki, François Roche, Alex Schweder, Slavs and Tatars, Maciej Sieńczyk, Jan Simon, Maciej Siuda, Kama Sokolnicka, Andrzej Szpindler, Aleksandra Wasilkowska, Magda Węgrzyn

Coplophon
  • Warsaw, 2015
  • Curator: Aleksandra Wasilkowska
  • Graphic design: Noviki
  • Veniue: Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw