salty bread

The venue has ceased to mean the physical reality of a museum and has started to act as an indicator of socio-economic relations, functioning as a kind of social, institutional, economic and political framework, thus becoming an artistic issue in itself.

Artur Żmijewski

I started collaboration with museum institutions which are representative in their fields of activity, such as Wieliczka Salt Mine and the Historical Museum of the City of Krakow. These venues housed installations created in accordance with the understanding of what ‘site-specific’ means. Such actions should be preceded by an in-depth analysis of the character of a given site, the scheme it functions within, its structure and history. A work of art is created in close relationship with the site, even if it means, so to say, acting against this site, in opposition to it, and temporarily disturbs its current mode of functioning. When I work on my projects, I think about what constitutes the identity of a site, how and why it comes into being, converts and redefines itself, and also about what does not undergo any transformation, remaining a stable element — a core around which changes oscillate. It is possible that ultimate [non-ambiguous?] answers to the essential questions do not exist and we just have to accept being able only to point towards them. For me, art is just this kind of indicator-raising questions and provoking thoughts. Artists and their works enable us to come a bit closer to answers and see questions from another perspective.