Group Exhibition
Urban Space + Brama Gallery
28.06 – 06.07
Curator: Kamil Kuitkowski
Opening: 28.06.2025, 7:00 PM
A unique location!
Starting point: Zwycięstwa 36
The exhibition will be open until 06.07.2025.
“Oh, darling, we’ve become a race of peeping Toms. People ought to get outside their own house and look in for a change. What do you think of that for a bit of homespun philosophy?”
“Reader’s Digest, April 1939.”
“I only quote the best (…) I should’ve been a gypsy fortune teller (…) I’ve got a nose for trouble.”
Shortly after this exchange between Stella – the nurse taking care of the immobilized photographer Jeff – Jeff, through his voyeurism, gets into real trouble. That’s what Hitchcock’s Rear Window from 1954 is all about, promoted at the time with the slogan:
“Through the window and the lens of his camera, he watched as a great city told its story, revealed paths of deception and… murder!”
Hitchcock’s New York is fascinatingly fictional – the studio-built backyard “behind-the-scenes” of the big city becomes a stage for mini-spectacles framed by windows.
At once unreal and completely plausible. Perhaps just like New York itself – both existing and even more vividly imagined. Its delirious energy, despite America’s growing dystopian reality, can still be captivating.
So captivating, in fact, that when city council members in Gliwice blocked the construction of two 100-meter-tall twin skyscrapers, a local resident submitted a petition asking them to reconsider. A skyscraper – even if, in a twin form, it dangerously recalls a certain date from 9 and 11 – is, as Koolhaas wrote, “a utopian device.”
It allows for dreaming, and since a skyscraper reaches up into the sky, it can also be a portal to another world.
The group exhibition A Window onto Two Backyards, spread across the urban space of Gliwice and the Brama Gallery, offers a chance to enter a game, a journey, a search. It doesn’t require anyone to become a hero – as in Tolkien’s The Two Towers. While art often borders on fantasy, it can also simply be looked at. And by exploring the works and actions of the participating artists, one can create their own stories. That too can be revolutionary.
Especially now, when – almost like in the opening sentence of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities – we can say: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” And just like in that novel, the city can become one of the main characters
Participating artists: Agnieszka Szostek, Magdalena Tryba, Karolina Jarzębak & Kat Zawada, Samuel Kłoda.
Organizers: Biennale Gliwice, Soundscape Foundation, Centrum Kultury Victoria Gliwicach.