Current and announcement
Jan Pfeiffer “SUPPORT POINTS”
Jan Pfeiffer’s “Support Points” focuses on the afterlife of signs and symbols (and their systems) that artificially sustain fallen ideas. The artist’s project, initiated in Silesia in 2014, first presented at the Kronika Centre for Contemporary Art (as part of a multi-year research program titled “Project Metropolis”), was dedicated to ideas transposed through a system of visual codes that constitute the foundations of Polish national iconography. The artist’s starting point were its evergreen symbols—saber and hussar wings.
“Support Points” evolve in successive iterations, taking on a processual form—the objects that constitute them are alternately elevated and fetishized, alternately degraded, only to return to their original glory a moment later. At the Kronika Center for Contemporary Art, they were already abandoned against a wall (though still gleaming). During the unveiling at the Silesian Museum, they were intentionally exposed to weathering and erosion in an open patio. They were then resuscitated several times in new locations and contexts by the artist himself.
“Support Points” are returning after years as art fetishes, in a version dedicated to art itself. In the show at BWA Katowice, the focus of “Support Points” is art itself, rotating on its axis—its mutually devouring tongues.
The installation takes the form of an intervention in the gallery’s exhibition space, simultaneously entering into dialogue with the other narratives of the “Aesthetic Congress” exhibition, as well as the pavilion’s architecture and its “propulsive” element, the spiral staircase.
opening: 7 p.m., March 27, 2026
The artist’s performance will take place during the exhibition opening.
exhibition: March 28–December 31, 2026
Jan Pfeiffer lives and works in Prague. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (2006–2011), the Prague College School of Art & Design (2002–2005) and the Cooper Union in New York (2011), he has also finished doctoral studies (Ph.D.) at the Charles University Faculty of Education, Department of Art Education (KVV) in Prague (2011-2015). He has participated in numerous exhibitions in the Czech Republic and abroad, including the Essl Art Award CEE (2009) and the Henkel Award (2011). He works in a variety of media, with interests in video, photography, animation, and drawing. He typically focuses on the topos of place and its perception. In the artist’s work, analytical reflection on historical, political, and sociocultural phenomena is combined with a fascination with mythological and religious symbolism. He is primarily interested in the almost imperceptible mechanisms and connotations that actually shape particular historical moments or social events.
Project is part of the “AESTHETIC CONGRESS” program – a year-long series of research based exhibitions and performance activites aimed at updating the formula of art institutions, carried out with the involvement of diverse, complementary artistic languages and tools, and the participation of artists and curators. The primary point of reference and, at the same time, the starting point is the BWA Katowice, an institution imprinted in the center of the city’s urban and social fabric as a tool of social engineering. The modernist pavilion, now a monument of architecture, is the coeval of the Polish wave of institutional criticism. The need for its spatial and ideological updating becomes the starting point for a discourse on the meanings and dynamics of art institutions understood in a universal dimension. For the duration of the project, the main exhibition space will be transformed into a year-round art laboratory. Historical projects will dialogue with completely new ones, shaping a collective reflection.
curator of the “AESTHETIC CONGRESS” – Łukasz Trzciński