Exhibition: 11.06–30.09.2021
Place: Willa Lentza – szczecińska instytucja kultury, Aleja Wojska Polskiego 84, 70-482 Szczecin, Poland
Curator: Stanisław Ruksza
Andrzej Tobis (born 1970) – visual artist. He chiefly practises photography and painting. He is a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice. Since 2006 she has been working on a long-term, utopian conceptual project ‘A–Z (Educational Cabinets)’, presented in many important art institutions in Poland and abroad.
‘A–Z (Educational Cabinets)’ is a utopian quasi-conceptual project by Andrzej Tobis, started over fifteen years ago, constituting a linguistic and visual journey around Poland. The artist has decided to ‘reconstruct’ the illustrated Polish-German dictionary Bildwörterbuch Deutsch und Polnisch published in Leipzig in 1954. The publishing house tried to capture the then visible world in the realities of the GDR and the People’s Republic of Poland.
Tobis’s photographs are not staged but found in the chaotic landscape of post-transformation contemporary Poland. This ‘conceptualism with a human face’ contains a lot of anecdotes, funny rebus, being also an accurate socio-political observation.
Tobis made the following assumptions for the project: the photographs may only be taken in Poland; photographed situations and objects are not arranged or digitally edited – they must be found; each entry in the German and Polish versions is provided with an index number from the original dictionary; the photo and the slogan placed under it on a white stripe are an integral whole.
Tens of thousands of dictionary entries to be found, photographed and archived is a total ‘work in progress’ idea. Since the premiere exhibition, in the fall of 2007, a huge number of new images have been created. There are over a thousand of them in total, and the exhibition in Villa Lentz presents the largest set of over four hundred, mostly new photographs from the last two years (including those taken in Western Pomerania), with the first showcases from the beginnings of the series.
Andrzej Tobis, cover, 2019, from the’A–Z (Educational Cabinets)’ series
Source: Willa Lentza