Galeria Kordegarda

curator: Magda Kardasz
cooperation: Krzysztof Gutfrański

Szymon Kobylarz’s most recent project, created specially for the Kordegarda, is another in a series of the artist’s experiments with gallery space and
artistic genres. Kobylarz likes to tell stories, create parallel realities, lay false trails, set traps for the viewer. The visitors of his exhibitions often feel like moving through a virtual-reality gaming system. The artist has been fascinated
lately by issues from the intersection of science, technology, military science and conspiracy theory. He says:

For some time now I have been interested in all kinds of “freaky” inventions. “Freaky” in many respects: not only their surprising applications, but also their often bizarre form. Most interesting of them all are the various military or paramilitary facilities, weapons of the future, being only envisaged, or weapons of the past, which already seem archaic.

Of course, Kobylarz is not a TV reporter discovering unknown historical facts or weaving sci-fi narratives inspired by The X-Files, but an artist revealing in his works the hidden mechanisms driving the development of science, the
ambivalence of the notion of progress, or utopias negatively verifi ed by time. Kobylarz is particularly interested in failed inventions and those who have
gotten out of control. When working on a project, he pays equal attention to academic sources and press reports as he does to more personal testimonies,
such as the stories of amateur enthusiasts of the given phenomenon googled from the web. The contemporary individual has been subject to ever
tighter control. City inhabitants in particular feel under constant surveillance (the system of security cameras). This has led to privacy concerns. The
omnipresence of the internet and computer networks makes life easier, but also creates a vast fi eld for privacy violations, personal data theft and other abuses. On the one hand, we want to feel safer in the frightening world we live in (plagued by terrorism or crime), while, on the other, we are starting to feel
we are no longer in control of our own lives. An Orwellian-urban legend in this vein is the theme of Kobylarz’s most recent project. The title, ECHELON70, alludes to the controversial global signals intelligence network. So this time too
a fantastic-aesthetical story has been inspired by real events. The artist invites the viewer to let their imagination run free, to conjecture and seek their own answers to the questions raised by the show. What are the white spheres placed in the Kordegarda’s baroque interiors? Domes of the Doppler radars supposedly used by ECHELON or modernist sculptures? What are the men in
the black-and-white photographs showing what looks like a 1970s laboratory doing? Who is the man sitting on a chair in the gallery’s side room, his head shaped like a futuristic sphere? A grotesque allegory of fi guration’s lost battle
against abstraction, a warning against losing our head to utopias, or a symbol of the individual’s enslavement by political biopower? Perhaps the answers will occur to the viewers during a session in the consciousness-altering (thought-censoring?) spherical helmet placed in the centre of the exhibit? Even if not, there will still remain the aesthetical pleasure of contemplating the composition of the sterile forms comprising the ECHELON70 installation.