Karolina Grzywnowicz, Walking through underwater meadows, installation, 2023. Photo by Zofia Paśnik
The history of museums and other art institutions is largely made of projects that address the sense of sight. What if we reversed this balance, and instead of a refined visual effect, unveiled just the scraps of long-term processes, the disappointing leftovers that resist rapid consumption? What if we displayed failures, unsuccessful efforts, tedious preparations, and embarrassing backstories?
The project ‘Anti-Handbook: How to Construct an Invisible Space?’ employed such collective tangents while employing art as a tool for working with fears. It was carried out in 2023 by the Kronika Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) in Bytom in collaboration with the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice and the Clinical Psychiatric Hospital in Rybnik. In addition to nine artists (Paweł Błęcki, Jagoda Dobecka, Magdalena Franczak, Jolanta Jastrząb, Natalia Kopytko, Barbara Kubska, Dominik Ritszel, Paweł Szeibel, Karolina Grzywnowicz), dozens of people from the hospital in Rybnik, both patients and therapists, took part in the project.
Paweł Szeibel, Przedzimie, 2023. Photo by Barbara Kubska
Paweł Szeibel, Przedzimie, 2023. Photo by Barbara Kubska
The essence of the project was to create a database of practices that could be implemented in institutions that support people in psychological crisis. In this context, the exhibition presenting the titular instructions served as a model, or a blueprint. It was the culmination of a series of activities at the Rybnik hospital that led to a temporary suspension of rules and regulations imposed by the institution. One part of this process was to transcend the ways in which the hospital functions as a total institution, where therapists and patients are separated, and a line firmly separates what is considered normal and what should be medicated and excluded from the social space with its deeply entrenched paradigms of utility and productivity.
Dominik Ritszel, frame from Random XYZ, 2023
Dominik Ritszel, frame from Random XYZ, 2023
Dominik Ritszel, frame from Random XYZ, 2023
Dominik Ritszel, frame from Random XYZ, 2023
One of the important aspects of collaborative work undertaken in the project was an anti-hierarchical approach, encouraging the exchange of competencies and learning from each other. ‘Anti-Handbook’, as a neologism that conveys the impossibility of formulating a single method of working with the psyche in crisis, emphasized the importance of activities undertaken in situ, without a desire for a holistic, systemic approach, rooted in a particular situation and time. The backdrop to the activities comprising the ‘Anti-Handbook’ was the historic architecture of the facility, whose origins date back to 1886. Listening to the decades-long history of the hospital, delving into its archives, and studying the evolving methods of treatment began with mapping its spaces. The buildings and the surrounding park were treated as lenses that magnified the sediments of the past and amplified the voices of the silenced.
Barbara Kubska, Nieobecni, photograph, 2020
Paweł Błęcki with patients of the psychiatric hospital in Rybnik, Latarnia, czyli świetlna fontanna, 2023. Photo by Paweł Błęcki
Paweł Błęcki with patients of the psychiatric hospital in Rybnik, Latarnia, czyli świetlna fontanna, 2023. Photo by Paweł Błęcki
The architecture, understood as a symbolic gateway to the hospital’s history, fueled the reworking of the patients’ personal experiences. Artists treated the hospital interiors, labyrinthine corridors, storage rooms, and staircases as a metaphorical organism full of blockages, tensions, rheumatic pains, and traces of past injuries in need of care and therapy. The catalysts were choreographic activities that ignited an unusual type of movement, significantly restricted within the confined spaces of total institutions, where the mobility of the body is impaired by design. The workshops were conducted both inside the hospital and the surrounding park. Derelict fountains, branches, tree trunks, walls, and hospital furnishings were all treated as exercise devices, simultaneously transformed into tools for working with the body and its memory.
Culminating the project, the exhibition organized at Kronika CCA in Bytom, due to the need to protect the privacy of those involved, was contingent on the presentation of props and models accompanying each of the actions. It was a collection of gestures, recorded conversations, and minimalist video recordings. In this way, the exhibition escaped the ‘showy’ category. Instead of self-indulgence, it offered a search for ways to create and describe art perceived as a field of exchange of experiences.
Marta Lisok is a curator and art critic. Since 2019, she has been affiliated with the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice, where since 2023 she has headed the Department of Art Theory and History. Since 2019, she has worked with the Doctoral School of the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. She is the author of the book Dzikusy. Nowa sztuka ze Śląska [Savages: New Art from Silesia] (2014) and numerous texts on art. Editor of the art section of the biweekly magazine Artpapier (2006-2009). Curator of dozens of collective and individual exhibitions. She lives and works in Katowice.