Current and announcment
Imagine summer — exhibition by Krzysztof Maniak as part of the ‘Sensorium’ project (not only) for children
In summer, the centre of Katowice sticks to your damp skin with the heavy smell of hot asphalt. The senses seem to shrink and work more sluggishly, lazy with the small amount of stimuli. I sometimes feel as if the inhaled hot air is scorching the inside of my nose, sealing off the receptors and numbing them to perceive smells. I rarely look at the sky, the sun blinding me and flooding my eyes with tears. I change the beaten urban trails, readjusting my trajectory to the patches of shade where I can take refuge from the scorching sun. I dream of finding myself as quickly as possible in a forest, a meadow or by the water…
Imagine there’s a place in the very centre of Katowice that will transport you out of the city. It activates your senses that will lead you to the memories of smells, tastes, colours, sounds of a full summer in nature.
Imagine lying in a meadow, looking up at the sky and searching for familiar shapes in the clouds.
Imagine summer…
We invite you to the Small Space of the BWA Contemporary Art Gallery, where from 9 August you will be able to experience the first instalment of the project about the senses called ‘Sensorium’. Krzysztof Maniak, an artist with an extraordinary sensitivity to the beauty of nature, will take you on an amazing journey. The exhibition opens at 10 a.m. on Friday, 9 August. It will run until 1 September.
— Aneta Zasucha
Sensorium* is an interdisciplinary project for children and their parents. It has two main objectives: first of all, the invited artists are to create works (art installations) that will function as an exhibition of one work in the space of the BWA Gallery building. These will be fully interactive, becoming a field for free exploration, experiencing art with all the senses. Children and parents will be able to touch, listen and smell them. This form of contact with art is extremely necessary and imaginative for children – they have a natural need to read art with all their senses, above all to touch it, which is usually forbidden in galleries and museums. The works of art will be exhibited in various places in the gallery, such as at the entrance, in the space next to the bookshop and in the Mała Przestrzeń.
The works will be complemented by accompanying activities: workshops and artistic actions carried out by invited artists and art educators. A publication will also be produced – a workbook for parents to work with their children, containing scenarios for educational and artistic activities about the senses.
The aim of these activities is to reflect on what sensing is, how we imagine our senses to work and try to understand how we use them – how we are inspired by stimuli and how we experience different qualities of states of ourselves. The aim of the project is to redefine our knowledge of the senses and perceptual processes by using different visual-sound-motor-touch-taste-smell techniques. The project is an offer for collective artistic collaboration, based on the involvement of people working in various artistic disciplines (visual arts, music, theatre, dance, culinary).
Curator
Aneta Zasucha
Artists invited to the project
Michalina Bigaj, Joanna Bronisławska/Asi Mina, Krzysztof Maniak, Małgorzata Rozenau, Paweł Szeibel, Jaśmina Wójcik, Joanna Zdzienicka-Obałek
* Sensorium refers to the sum total of the body’s perceptions and the place of feeling from which a person experiences and interprets the environments where they live. In the fields of medicine, psychology and physiology, it refers to the unique and changing nature of the entire sensory environment as perceived by the individual. This includes the sensation, perception and interpretation of information about the world around us through faculties of the mind, such as the senses, phenomenal and psychological perception, cognition and intelligence.
