The exhibition includes various types of visual artworks including graphic design, animation, artists' films and performances. It brings together works by Polish and Hungarian artists in order to move away from the predictable, the known and the legitimate. Tomorrow Was a Montage is an opportunity to present rarely seen works that challenge the visual language and polemical politics from the 1960s and 70s alongside contemporary works. The exhibition's organisers say:
Fragments, juxtapositions, sudden illuminations, jarring proximities and a suspicion of systems; this is the image of the world offered by montage. Addressing time and space as a field of discontinuities, ruptures and breakages, montage overwhelms and unsettles perception. Pioneered in the first half of the twentieth century by the Surrealists and early Soviet filmmakers, montage became a radical subversive strategy of dissonance and shock for artists, designers, writers and thinkers seeking to challenge stereotypical images of the contemporary.
The exhibition is to present 60 posters made by the legendary Polish artist Roman Cieślewicz, films by Jan Lenica and Zbigniew Rybczyński, a screening event of amazing film works by the Hungarian painter and experimental filmmaker György Kovásznai, and the work of the up-and-coming Polish film and sound artist Wojciech Bąkowski.
Wojciech Bąkowski
Born in 1979, Wojciech Bąkowski is an animated film and video director, a visual artist, poet, musician, and a creator of audio performances and alternative music. He is also known by the stage name WuEsBe. The world depicted in his films shows reality as perceived through the eyes of the audience – muddled, spoken in colloquialisms and barely intelligible. His works reflect a newfound internationalism that references the developments of modernism whilst simultaneously engaging with the legacy of the former East. His trademark style consists of expressive images and his low, trance-like voice in the background. His films are shown at galleries, museum exhibitions and animated film festivals, and are included in anthologies. His musical events are at times treated as audio performances, others as concerts.
Roman Cieślewicz
Roman Cieślewicz (b. 1930, Poland, d. 1996, Paris) is one of the most renowned graphic designers of the second half of the 20th century. He had an active career in Poland before moving to Paris in 1963 where he continued to create posters, teach at Ecole Superieure des Arts Graphiques, and work on commercial projects. Cieślewicz had over one hundred solo exhibitions and participated in all major poster biennales in the world. His works can be found in the collections of the Polish national museums in Warsaw, Krakow, Poznań, Wrocław, the Poster Museum in Warsaw, and in the Museum of Art in Łódź and in major international collections such as Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), MoMA in New York, Musée d'Arts Décoratifs in Paris, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Library of Congress in Washington DC, and Musée de Grenoble in Grenoble.