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The Skin We Live In | Marcin Białas

Opening: 04.10.2024, 7:00 PM

Exhibition open until 30.10.2024.

 

The Skin We Live In

You scratch yourself. A reflex. That’s just how it is. You want to shake it off, wash it away, throw it out and stomp on it, but you can’t. It’s not that simple. Methodically, it burrows into and wounds your body, writhing somewhere beneath the skin, leaving marks and causing shivers. Eventually, it’s extracted from you. Slimy and shapeless. Helpless without its host, who you were just a moment ago. You shudder. You burrow. Throughout your life, you leave traces of your presence. More and more apartments and staircases with steps worn smooth by your shoes and those like you. With your car’s wheels, you wear down asphalt surfaces, distort concrete sidewalks. You involuntarily cover the facades of houses and buildings with a gray layer of greasy grime. You writhe in the skin of the city until finally, you’re shaken off without warning. You’re no longer a part of this organism. You end up where you’re supposed to, where all those like you will eventually go. Somewhere beyond. But I don’t shudder. I remain indifferent because something within me knows that you need me, but I no longer need you. Even when there’s no one left to sweep the streets of crumbling plaster, and the empty buildings slowly start to be overgrown by trees, I will live on, though likely in a different form than humans can imagine. That’s just how it is.

The distorted figures in Marcin Białas’s early works parasitize the urban fabric, only to eventually merge with it, leaving their presence merely as a suggestion. His newer works, however, depict a completely different state of affairs, where signs of habitation are hard to find. In these, the city’s space gains a new identity, emancipates itself, and separates from the human world. It reveals itself as a fully-fledged and intelligent entity, using its own language and words, the meanings of which we can only imagine. Perhaps Marcin Białas has deciphered these words.

Maciek Cholewa

An accompanying exhibition of the 12th Polish Graphic Art Triennial in Katowice