The exhibition Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. Marginalia filozoficzne / Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz - Philosophical Margins focuses on hitherto unknown forms of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz's creative activities. It presents the notes and drawings that the artist and writer made in the 1930s in the margins of the philosophical books he read. Witkacy's marginal notes constitute often humorous comments to the texts he studied and are intertwined with notes of a personal nature; the drawings he added at page edges, often acting as illustrations, suggest motifs known widely from his paintings.
Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz's philosophical annotations have been preserved on the pages of over thirty books that are currently in the collection of the Library of the Institute of Philosophy of Warsaw University. They constitute unusually valuable documentation of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz's intellectual explorations and passions just before World War II, in the period when he not only created art and literature but also produced his primary philosophical works.
The purpose of the exhibition Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz - Philosophical Margins is to draw an analogy between Witkacy's artistic concepts and his philosophical thinking. The presentation constitutes an opportunity to reflect upon the place and role of philosophy in his output as a whole. We expect it to prompt further development of research into the biography, art, and philosophy of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz.
The exhibition Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz - Philosophical Margins at the Centre for Contemporary Art includes a series of enlargements of book pages on which S.I. Witkiewicz recorded his philosophical annotations. These are displayed alongside his paintings, drawings, portraits, and photographs. Also on display are surviving musical manuscripts and contemporary recordings of Witkacy's musical compositions, as well as the original books from the collection of the Library of the Institute of Philosophy of Warsaw University. The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive catalogue containing the first-ever published reproductions of pages with Witkacy's annotations. In addition, on February 22nd the CCA will host a symposium dedicated to the aesthetic and philosophical thought of S. I. Witkiewicz, involving exceptional scholars of his life and work.

The exhibition Messiah College constitutes the first full presentation of a video project that artist Paweł Kruk began creating in 2002. Revelation, the first film in the MC series, premiered during the exhibition Novart.pl held in Krakow. The second film of the series, Foundation, was included in the exhibition Rzeczywiście młodzi są realistami / Really, the Young are Realists, held at the Centre for Contemporary Art at Ujazdowski Castle. The current exhibition is the first-ever presentation of the third part of the series alongside the two first Messiah College films.
Paweł Kruk (born 1976, graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan) is best known for a previous project titled Larger Than Life. This consisted of a series of video works in which the artist portrayed legendary American basketball player Michael Jordan, repeating statements made by the athlete during interviews, mimicking his gestures and facial expressions. This project also included video-performances and artistic actions that involved Paweł Kruk playing basketball within gallery spaces. In that work the artist focused on the athlete as contemporary icon. Kruk explored the analogy between the status of someone like Jordan and the role and condition of the artist.
In Larger Than Life, Kruk spoke through the figure of a star and idol. In Messiah Collage, on the other hand, the artist speaks on his own behalf, building and simultaneously analysing a new icon made up of his own body, image, and experiences. The title Messiah College contains the implication of teaching and suggests a kind of educational system. Be that so, the artist has declared that his own project, though it may fit within an educational framework, is not intended as an educational endeavour. Rather, Messiah College is about the condition of the artist. As Kruk understands it, an artist is someone who makes public utterances, but also someone who learns and reports on what he or she has learned.
The project is therefore more of an attempt at defining what makes an individual an artist than it is an utterance about messiahs or artist-messiahs. According to its dictionary definition, a messiah is a prophet who embodies some Cause or Hope. The artist would thus be a messiah awaited by no one and a prophet of his or her own, individually defined Cause. Kruk considers solitude to be a constituent element of the condition of the artist. In Kruk's opinion, solitude is the ontological basis that enables an artist to venture beyond the material dimension of existence.

The installation Niebo nad Berlinem / The Sky Above Berlin is part of a cycle titled POLONIA - GERMANIA that artist Włodzimierz Jan Zakrzewski has been working on for three years. The artist has taken on the objective of examining Polish-German relations in their full, still emotionally charged complexity. Zakrzewski owes his new and universal view of this issue to the twenty years he spent in the United States. This fresh perspective has allowed him to venture outside of existing stereotypes and to offer viewers a look at the two countries in the context of centuries of the history of the European continent.
In the first part, viewers encounter political slogans and national mottoes from the past. The artist has situated a series of mirrors opposite each other, adorning these with Polish and German mottoes and slogans. Ironically, quotes from Polish history have been translated into German and German statements rendered in Polish. Walking through the mirrored corridor, viewers are offered a view of the slogans considered most typical to the two nations through a distorting mirror.
To see the second part of the installation, viewers proceed into a darkened room, where they encounter an arrangement of floor protrusions meant to be felt rather than seen. This arrangement of bothersome outcroppings reflects arrays of artillery shell marks that exist on the walls of buildings in Warsaw and Berlin. Transferred to the gallery floor, they are a reflection of the singular map of war that can still be observed to this day on the walls of buildings in both cities.
Zakrzewski has devoted the final part of this project to the issue of Polish-German borders. In the installation, borders are symbolised by neon shafts that have been arranged in two stacks on opposing sides of the room - one Polish, the other German. Those neon rods that are lit represent the current border between the two countries. The remaining rods look like no more than tinder sticks, they indubitably constitute a significant part of our shared history. Over these symbolic borders hangs a canvas upon which the artist has painted a map of the sky above Berlin according to the astronomical situation on September 1, 2003.

Installation made possible through the support of:
Centrum Kultury Zamek / "The Castle" Centre of Culture in Poznan in co-operation with Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle and Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin

Lawrence Weiner is one of America's most interesting conceptual artists. In 1996 Weiner produced a work for the CCA which consisted of placing inscriptions on the western and northern façades of Ujazdowski Castle. The two inscriptions read "O wiele rzeczy za dużo by zmieścić w tak małym pudełku" and (its English equivalent) - "Far too many things to fit into so small a box." The artist is most interested in the relationship between language and meaning, and in their dependence on the contexts within which they appear.

Jenny Holzer is one of America's most important middle generation artists and was an award-winner at the 44th Venice Biennale in 1990. In the mid 1970s she abandoned abstract painting and chose text as her primary artistic medium. She disseminates artistic statements through means and mechanisms created for use in advertising and the public "iconosphere" of consumer society. Holzer adorns electronic light boards, posters, billboards, T-shirts, as well as stone benches with pronouncements and aphorisms that reference the realm of clichés and stereotypes. In 1993 the CCA presented Holzer's works in public spaces throughout Warsaw and at Ujazdowski Castle. Her stone Benches were the first piece in the permanent "Sculpture Garden" of the Centre for Contemporary Art.

Joanna Rajkowska
GREETINGS FROM JERUSALEM AVENUE

Project 13.12.2002 - 29.02.2004., Warsaw, Ch. de Gaulle Circle
Project will remain on view for 12 months
Co-operation: Michal Rudnicki, Katarzyna Lyszkowicz - Institute of Art Promotion Foundation Rondo Ch. de Gaulle'a

The Association of Friends of the Castle and Military Hospital at Ujazdów was created at Ujazdowski Castle in 1991. The organization brings together former staff of the Hospital at Ujazdów (doctors, nurses, medics) as well as former patients, who collectively and with pride refer to themselves as the Rzeczpospolita Ujazdowska (Ujazdów Republic). The association's main objective is to promote knowledge about the oldest-known settled site in the history of Warsaw, known more generally as Upper Ujazdów. The year 2002 marked the 740th anniversary of the establishment of Jazdów Castle and the 210th anniversary of the creation of Warsaw's oldest military hospital. Ujazdowski Castle was once a royal residence. In 1792 it was transformed into Ujazdowski Hospital, and as such was important during national uprisings and wars for independence, throughout the years of the 2nd Republic, during the defence of Warsaw in September of 1939, and throughout the years of the Nazi occupation of Poland.
The permanent exhibition of the Castle Museum includes, among a range of other items, a corner stone dated September 16, 1624, unearthed on March 5, 1975 while work was being done under the foundations of Ujazdowski Castle's eastern wing. This was the first-ever find in Poland of a corner stone engraved with the date of initiation of construction of a historical edifice. The more than sixty views of Ujazdowski Castle throughout its history on view derive from the Mechanical Documentation Archive, the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Conservator of Monuments of the Province of Mazowsze, the Warsaw Historical Museum, the National Museum, and the Military Geographic Command.

The realm of technology is not strictly the domain of scientific institutes, but is also a terrain of inspirational activity (the purely artistic and the artistic cum cognitive) that assumes many and various directions: into the future, into the past, sideways to both, and deep into phenomena. The idea of reverse engineering - using universally available technical devices for creative purposes in a manner not foreseen by their designers and manufacturers - is compatible with the activities of artists who similarly explore contrary directions and themes and their work.
Some are interested in technologies that have been marginalized by continuous progress. In our post-industrial age, they grant past technological achievements new functions, transforming them into manifestations of unceasing inventiveness that continuously delineates new directions of human activity. Others use the newest technologies for purposes that are reversals or modifications of their intended applications. In both cases, technology is stripped of simple functionality, understood as the performance of a certain kind of labor for humans. It is granted a different kind of labor - primarily thought-based - that extracts layers of emotion and manifests unexpected meaning and direction.
A more general strategy of contrariness can also be found among artists who start with social and cultural issues, rather than with technology itself. In presenting known phenomena, they apply solutions opposite to those we might expect or be accustomed to seeing. The fictional scenarios they create reveal truths that remain invisible on a daily basis and are much like the proverbial "opposite side of the coin."
Reverse Art and Engineering presents objects, actions, images, and projections by more than a dozen Polish artists. This group of creators offers audiences a view of functionality that approaches the absurd and resides within a utopia. Simultaneously, however, it continues to delineate potent meanings, effectively probing the subconscious realms of technology and providing art the means to escape dogmatic divisions into what is progressive or anachronistic, functional or unusable, fictional or real.
This project has been mounted in a place whose history itself is a stunning example of change in terms of function and meaning. The Skulpturens Hus arts center is located within a renovated factory that once formed part of an industrial complex belonging to Alfred B. Nobel. Located in the city of Vinterviken, the facility primarily produced dynamite and nitroglycerine. In the years 1891-1909, the main hall of the Skulpturens Hus housed a sulfuric acid production line. Today, the explosive and industrial past of this place has been "reversed" to serve artistic purposes, while Nobel's name is more readily associated with an array of scientific, artistic, and social awards than with the explosives industry. Strategies of reversal do not sever links to the past; however, they also stop far short of assuming a museum-like or sentimental stance towards it.

Grzegorz Borkowski