Zak Branicka's upcoming exhibition,
Szymon Kobylarz's Civil Defense opens
Friday, November 20th 6-9pm
See link on Art Paper Invitations
Paranoid protuberances of science are Szymon Kobylarz’s source of inspiration. He is interested in quasi-scientific absurdities and the border on which rationality and obsession fester.
This theme was already present in his thesis exhibition for which he composed the fictional interior of a Euthanasia proffering institution. The rooms, cloned at a smaller scale, fuse the lack of ambiguity of a reception area with the strangeness of a planned suicide.
Science and obsession also meet in the work, Mr. Jan Kolano’s Cell (Cela Pan Jana Kolano, 2008). Kobylarz reconstructed the story of a murderer and a genius based on various media sources. Jan Kolano spent 20 years in prison where he worked without any instruments to make discoveries that were awarded recognition by scientists.
In his newest work, realized for Gallery ZAK BRANICKA, Kobylarz utilizes experiences from his school days. At that time and in light of the Cold War, all the Warsaw Agreement member states established “Civil Defense” courses. The subject matter of these lessons regarded defense mechanisms pertaining to various threats and the requisite behavior in the case of catastrophe. The children learned First Aid measures. They also obtained basic knowledge of the building and handling of weapons.
For Kobylarz, the “Civil Defense” course had a completely different meaning: it was a frame in which the boys were finally allowed to play war. At that time as well as now, he is so engaged by the provisional and abstruse conception of homemade emergency equipment that he dedicated the entire exhibition to it.
As usual, archival materials form the point of origin for the work: he retraced the antique safety instructions, constructing their modern caricature. Today, one can find countless short films and documents about homemade weapons on the Internet. If one were to type “how to do + weapons” into a search engine, he or she would run into fabrications that can be quite dangerous, although in most cases the findings would be the extravagant fantasies of private tinkerers.
Kobylarz is interested in these constructions as an example of uncontrolled knowledge. As a dabbler endowed with the very Polish talent of being able to make anything out of nothing, he is also fascinated in the handiwork behind these objects. He has collected the examples that he found on the Internet and built an entire series of homemade versions for urban survival: a macaroni-bomb, a gasmask made of Coca Cola bottles, a smoke grenade constructed from a ping pong ball, a potato flint and a periscope fashioned out of an empty milk carton. ZAK BRANICKA displays these absurd and simultaneously comical, but surprisingly well functioning objects in classical weapon vitrines, strengthening the ambiguity between crackpot dabbling and dangerous reality.
With “Civil Defense” Kobylarz asks the questions, what happens to science if it takes a wrong turn? How far can science let itself be compromised and perverted? While working on this project, the artist transformed himself into a kook inventor and in that process he turned towards an antiquated artistic model: he has repositioned art between science and Utopia.
