Sensory Micro-landscapes
In his curatorial text written for the 15th Gwangju Biennale, Nicolas Bourriaud raises fundamental questions about the new potential imaginaries of space in the era of the Anthropocene. Paweł Janicki, the curator of the Polish Pavilion, supplements this perspective with the theme of radical positioning that is provided by media art.
This means being able to understand the global by engaging with the local – not only in terms of geographical location, but also situated experiences and affects. Only thanks to this we are able to move beyond the media’s 'topologies of violence' and deconstruct the Western conceptions of grand narratives, to recall the words of the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, whose social critique is among Janicki’s essential points of reference.
According to Byung-Chul Han, the primary purpose of mass media entertainment is to maintain and strengthen a social order that is based on an economy of pleasure. Indeed, control is exercised through the distribution of this very model of sensory perception and consumption. As Janicki quite rightly points out, this state of affairs is the new kind of spectacle – the mass media’s image of reality replacing reality, as Guy Debord observed decades ago. This new kind of spectacle generates social fatigue and even exhaustion. In turn, the exhibition presented in the Polish Pavilion, as Paweł Janicki explains, acknowledges those who experience this state of perpetual fatigue. They are, as Debord would have it, weary of the spectacle, and stupefied by the violence of the narrative, entertainment, infotainment, and edutainment, as Byung-Chul Han writes. Today, reinvented media art, situated beyond the compulsion to entertain and the need to offer simple answers, is of no small importance.
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The exhibition in the Polish Pavilion offers a micro-space for the operation of affect, emotion, and interaction. Thus, it has the potential to synthesize knowledge stemming from different cultural forms of experience and to connect the past with a speculative vision of the future, in order to reclaim agency, and begin – at last! – to right the wrongs. As Bourriaud writes, a relational space brings together the visual and the aural. Similarly, the Polish Pavilion, confronts us with sensory micro-landscapes of experiences and affects, which should encourage us to redefine, rethink, and even re-imagine our position within the planetary and local systems of relations.
Written by Agnieszka Jelewska & Michał Krawczak, 2024