Opening: September 4, 2009
Szymon Kobylarz's newest project, specially prepared for the Kordegarda Gallery is the latest in the line of the artist's experiments with the gallery spaces and artistic genres. The title of the exhibition ECHELON 70, refers to the name of the powerful system of the control of the transmission of electronic data that for some time has been arousing lively discussion. The life of contemporary people is subjected to ever greater control.
It is particularly the inhabitants of cities who feel observed (by systems of urban cameras that ensure their safety). The consciousness of being controlled gives birth to a fear of the excessive limitation of freedom. On the one side, we want to feel safe in an alarming contemporary world, on the other, we start to have a feeling of a loss of control over our own lives. It is precisely this sort of Orwellian urban legend that Szymon Kobylarz, as someone that has become especially drawn to questions on the border between the fields of science, technology, the military and conspiracy theories, took as his starting material. "Odd" discoveries that emerge outside the frame of his original assumptions have become the object of the artist's particular interest.
Kobylarz likes to tell stories, build parallel realities, confuse tropes and lay traps for the viewer. Visiting an exhibition of his can at times recall a journey into the world of a virtual game. And this time the artist invites the viewer to let the imagination run free, to contemplate and find one's own answer to the intriguing questions that the exhibition asks. What are the white balls situated in the baroquely decorated interior of Kordegarda? Sometimes Doppler radars probably used in the Echelon system, a modernist sculpture, a warning against excessive enthusiasm for a utopia, or a symbol of the enslavement of a person by a state-police system?
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