In recent years, the artist has become increasingly interested in issues on the border of science, technology, military studies and conspiracy theory of history – where science meets madness.
His graduation project was a model of a euthanasia clinic, built on a scale only slightly smaller than the actual (Model of an Institution on a scale of 1:1.5, 2007). Before that he presented smaller models on a scale of 1:10 at a solo exhibition in the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw. This is how he described the project for the clinic:
The first room is a combination of a hotel reception and a doctor’s waiting room. The colour scheme refers to the yellows and the browns as colours of omnipotence, but also as colours of the earth, and to the black colour as something noble (e.g. the shiny surface of a black piano), but also as a colour of mourning. The brightness of the room is meant to highlight its polished elements. This is a warm interior, with the most intense colour combination. The last room is in turn something between a bedroom and a hospital isolation ward. The first model has the coolest colours, while the other one presents a more detailed interior.
In a similar project entitled Mr Jan Kolano’s Cell (2008), Kobylarz recreated the cell where Jan Kolano, a murderer, but also an amateur scientist, spent 20 years of his life. The reconstruction was based on a wide range of source materials. While in prison, Kolano made numerous discoveries, which were later confirmed by academic science. In turn, the installation Ionocraft. Fake version (2008), ‘told’ the story of the designer who invented the device that flies thanks to the phenomenon of ion wind. Kobylarz presented his own vision of this amateur-inventor’s cluttered studio.
The artist recreated his own studio at the exhibition Conspiracy of Art in 2008. During the opening he slept in the model after taking sleeping pills. The event, however, was more complicated and referred to the so-called diss. Imitating the hip-hop freestyle battles based on copying the style of the opponent or the transformation of fragments of his work, two of Kobylarz’s students from the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice buried his model Superjednostka in the academy’s basement in retaliation for painting their pictures in black and adding them to the installation in the Sektor Gallery.
The artist’s solo exhibition Echelon 70 in the Kordegarda Gallery in Warsaw (2009) made reference to the powerful electronic data system, but it also explored the broader problem of control over the life of the individual in the modern world in the form of, for example, monitoring:
On the one hand, we want to feel safer in the scary modern world, and, on the other, we begin to lose control over our own lives – wrote the curator of the exhibition.
Kobylarz put white balls in the gallery space; some of them became carriers of meaning.
The enigmatic domes of Bad Albing in Bavaria (one of the overground headquarters of Echelon) – wrote Krzysztof Gutfrański – are turned into a spare head or a modernist sculpture, evoking unexpected associations, which constantly revolve around the very relevant problem of the crisis of history.
In turn, the artist’s individual exhibition in the Żak-Branicka Gallery in Berlin in late 2009 and early 2010 referred to the defence training course, which he remembered from school, and whose aim was to prepare students in the case of a disaster or a war. They were taught how to give first aid, how to behave in the event of a catastrophe, and even how to use weapons. Kobylarz turned the defence lessons into a war game for boys. Inspired by the knowledge he acquired at school, he designed emergency equipment and primitive weapons in his home, using only household items and widely available materials. He created a gas mask from a Coca-Cola bottle, a periscope from a carton of milk, a smoke grenade from a ping-pong ball, and a bomb from noodles. All the items were presented in glass cases. The exhibition thus became a caricature of Communist safety instructions.
In his exhibition – says the curatorial text – Kobylarz raises questions about science and its unpredictable consequences. Would science make compromises and would it sacrifice its principles?
The exhibition also presented an installation, which the artist created at the Survival Festival in Wrocław in 2010 – it was an improvised shelter built from thousands of books.
Author: Karol Sienkiewicz, December 2010, transl. Bozhana Nikolova, March 2015