Zachęta National Gallery of Art

artists: Grzegorz Sztwiertnia, Zbigniew Warpechowski, Marina Abramovic, Marina Abramovic/Ulay, Vito Acconci, akcjoniści wiedeńscy (Günther Brus, Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch, Rudolf Schwarzkogler), Lygia Clark, Roman Dziadkiewicz, Joan Jonas, Ana Mendieta, Bruce Nauman, Gina Pane, Carolee Schneemann, Hannah Wilke
curators: Magda Kulesza (Instytut Teatralny im. Zbigniewa Raszewskiego), Jarosław Suchan (Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi), Hanna Wróblewska (Zachęta)

An exhibition prepared at Zachęta in co-operation with the Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre Institute in Warsaw and the Jerzy Grotowski Institute in Wrocław, as part of the celebrations to mark Grotowski Year.

Elements from Grotowski’s work will be shown through the prism of the visual arts: film documentation of rehearsals, performances, actor exercises and interviews with the director will be placed alongside works by artists who are linked to him by a common inspiration or similar approaches to art, the body and spirituality.

The exhibition grows out of the need to reconsider Grotowski’s work as a phenomenon essential, not only in the perspective of the development of the theatre, but also in the wider context of the cultural changes of the second half of the 20th century to which the visual arts, theatre and literature all testify.

The exhibition title is the title of one of Jerzy Grotowski’s texts. Georges Banu wrote about this text that it “should be read as a route map, and not as a programmatic statement, a final document or a closed account”. The exhibition should be read in a similar spirit: its goal is not to present the whole of Grotowski’s work, of his ‘oeuvre’, nor does it have the character of a monography of this outstanding director and anthropologist of the theatre. It is rather a collection of ‘notes’ made on the margins of what has been perceived as the main body of Grotowski’s work. Through the presentation of documentary recordings of exercises, fragments of rehearsals and performances, and conversations with Grotowski, the exhibition attempts rather to reconstruct the artist’s thoughts about the body as a site of primordial experiences of spiritual reality.