On November 26, 2022, I had the opportunity to participate in the opening of the Kosmos-Lem-Jewelry exhibition in Gdańsk, at the Main Town Hall. I was invited to take part in the project by one of the curators of the exhibition – Giedymin Jabłoński.
I was very happy with the proposal, because there was a moment in my life when astrophysics was a subject very close to my heart. So much, that I applied for an artistic residency at the astronomical observatory on the island of La Palma. To be honest, the work shown in this exhibition was designed as part of an application for an internship in La Palma. Those plans didn’t work out, but I can boast that at least I was able to visit the observatory in Parkes, Australia, which was involved in the first landing on the Moon.
Parkes – obserwatorium astronomiczne
My work is called “Galaxy”. The necklace is a sculptural representation of the Spiral Galaxy (Milky Way), with particular emphasis on the Arm of the Cross and Orion, which are the richest in terms of groupings of stars and red giants (garnets). The center of the galaxy in the necklace is zitrine, recreating the impression of hundreds of shining stars that are accumulated inside each galaxy. The position of the Solar System and the Earth in relation to the entire Galaxy is marked in the necklace with a small diamond, that in noticeable between about 800 zirconias – other stars, systems, etc. Although the place of the Earth is insignificant in the scale of the cosmos, for its inhabitants it is a treasure. The necklace shows luminescence, glowing blue in the dark.
The strings on which the pendant is suspended are so delicate that when worn around the neck, they become invisible, giving the impression of the galaxy itself floating. At the same time, their spirality is supposed to refer to the extension of the arms of the galaxy, with stars (silver balls) scattered from the center less and less often in the sad, empty space of the vast cosmos. I even thought that it was quite funny to associate those strings with strings from the “string theory”. It’s a term from theoretical physics assuming strings as the basic units that build our reality, the vibration of which is creates the existence of space-time, matter and the shape of reality as we know or do not know it yet.
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Here’s more about the exhibition itself:
Kosmos-Lem-Jewelry is an international project of the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław, which is attended by over 100 artists. The authors of the project proposed the participants to use as sources of inspiration, the idea of the Cosmos and various aspects of literary creativity by Stanisław Lem, a great Polish artist – writer, philosopher and futurologist. The materialization of the project idea is a unique collection of objects with character widely understood jewelry, in the form of an exhibition, presented successively in a special selected places. The creators of the project hope that in the discourse contemporary art, directed in recent years mainly towards the past and the present, this statement, which is a glimpse into the future, can become an important declaration and an attempt by the creators to take up the role again of the avant-garde of culture.
Curators Agata Danielak-Kujda and Giedymin Jabłoński.
The intention of the organizers is to present the exhibition in places related to Lem and the theme of the project. Stanisław Lem was born in Lviv, then lived and worked successively in Krakow, Vienna and Berlin, therefore these cities are proposed as locations for subsequent exhibitions. The final presentations of the exhibition are: NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, and
Cosmos – sending a digital (and maybe a printed) version of the project catalog, saved on a suitable medium, into extraterrestrial space.
Below are photos from the opening night at 26.11.2022 in Gdańsk, Poland. The historic interiors of the Museum in the Town Hall make an amazing impression!
