This Place is Called the Hole

A theatre without posters. One-man show. It treats city as a giant set where the audience is not a recipient but an element of the show. The works of Cezary Bodzianowski are an original artistic creation consistently practised for years. This is the first so extensive a catalogue to illustrate it.
The publication is an album of photographic documentation of ephemeral ‘events' gently disrupting the course of everyday life. The catalogue is supplemented by a theoretical part. It includes a text by Catherine Wood who analyses the way Bodzianowski transforms prosaic situations into 'unreal' moments. Jarosław Suchan sees in Bodzianowski's works the continuation of avant-garde thought whose artistic prority was participation in creating reality instead of creating a painting. Susanne Titz describes the influence of the many years spent in Antwerp and encounters with the art of Magritte, Broodthaers, the Surrealists and Conceptual artists had on Bodzianowski's art.

“This catalogue accompanies the exhibition by Cezary Bodzianowski, ‘This Place is Called the Hole', the first museum retrospective of the work of one of the most original figures on the contemporary art scene. Cezary Bodzianowski has been part of this scene since the mid-1990s; he is known as the author of slight, sometimes hardly perceptible interventions, disturbing the natural course of day-to-day life and inserting an element of absurd, anarchizing poetry into it. [...] The accompanying publication aims to sum up the artist's creative output to date. The intention is not so much to produce an in-depth catalogue of Bodzianowski's oeuvre, but rather to demonstrate various strategies employed by the artist in his game with reality and, most of all, to pose the question about the status of reality in his work, as well as the status of the “authorial” I and its relation to the real. [...] Both the exhibition and the catalogue show Bodzianowski's artistic practice as a singular attempt to overcome the dichotomy between art and life, providing an alternative to avant-garde utopias that attempt to bring order to life according to artistic precepts and neo-avant-garde models that eliminate art as an arbitrarily (institutionally) and invalidly isolated fragment of human reality.” – Jaroslaw Suchan and Susanne Titz