Field of Vision: CENTRALA / Wojciech Zamecznik
an exhibition at the Archeology of Photography Foundation (Fundacja Archeologia Fotografii), Warsaw, 20 April–27 May 2018
download full exhibition’s texts
Field of Vision: CENTRALA / Wojciech Zamecznik
an exhibition at the Archeology of Photography Foundation (Fundacja Archeologia Fotografii), Warsaw, 20 April-27 May 2018
In frame of the Live Archives project, CENTRALA was invited by the Archeology of Photography Foundation to take a closer look at the archives of an exhibitioner, graphic designer and photographer, Wojciech Zamecznik. Taking advantage from our perspective of researchers, designers and re-constructors of historical exhibitions, we designed an installation that addressed the ideas hidden in the exhibition The Age of Enlightenment in Poland, designed by Zamecznik and Maurycy Stryjecki in 1952.
Here is how we described the experience of working on the Field of Vision project in 2018:
Analyzing the archival materials associated with exhibition designs authored by Wojciech Zamecznik—realized individually or with his collaborators—we can distinguish the entire spectrum of spatial and art solutions which aimed at intensifying the experience of visiting the exhibition. Zamecznik’s exhibition design workshop experimented with the features of particular space, balancing its informative and aesthetic functions. By multiplying means of artistic expression, which an exhibition attacked its viewers with, he tried to influence and broaden the perception capabilities of the visitors. Zamecznik, his contemporaries alike, each time cared to achieve a different sort of impressions or different character of the entirety.
Field of Vision was broadened thanks to the three-dimensionality of the applied solutions as well as combining graphics, photography and painting, and turning them into altering entirety/entirety experienced through movement—when a spectator shifts around, and not—as it often happens today—via the motion of multimedia. Nowadays we are able to figure out the storyline of this experience.
To reconstruct the subsequent relations: spectator-object, object-design, and first and foremost the relation on the line: spectator-spectator. The latter one might be observed in some of the preserved photographs, showing visitors as a counterpart of the composition, an element in motion.
Juxtaposition of the archival black and white photographs with color designs gives a lot of joy. Presented together, they allow to reconstruct the exhibitions in mind the way Zamecznik designed them and the audience experienced—in color. We are presenting our interpretations of the grammar of exhibitions, which we have also learnt by the encounter with this archive, as well as our subjective associations and terms, which—we believe—are worth reclaiming.
download full exhibition’s texts