Exhibition

The world of this exhibition is the world after a disaster materialized here as a heap of scattered objects, machines and costumes from Cricot 2 Theatre productions. The curators, Magorzata Paluch-Cybulska and Michal Kobialka, radically reject the chronological narrative employed in the past displays at the Cricoteka to reveal the cracks in our world and in this museum space. They blur the boundaries of time and create a space open to new interpretations. In the post-catastrophic landscape, accumulated stage objects lose their independent status and develop new meanings.

The exhibition’s leading theme is the memory of the difficult past in both the personal and historical dimensions, as an idea clearly present in the artist’s work. While World War I was only a vague memory for Kantor, one shaped above all by the collective memory, his experience of World War II was fully conscious. It was the time of danger and destruction but simultaneously the time of creation that was forever marked by rebellion against the mechanisms that govern history.

The curators of the exhibition explore questions about the influence of history on the artist’s work, and on art itself. They ask how art which represents traumatic past or sense of impending danger may implicate the shape of its presentation in museums today.

Audio/Visual Tour and Lecture Presentation (English)

Michal Kobialka leads you through a new exhibition of Tadeusz Kantor's works now on display at the Cricoteka in Kraków, Poland. He starts with a brief introduction to Kantor's theatre praxis. It is followed by his comments on the curatorial concepts and motivations the co-curator, Małgorzata Paluch-Cybulska, and he employed to assemble an exhibition that illuminates the impact of twentieth-century world-historical events on Kantor's theories of theatre and shows how Kantor imagined a museum could saturate a work of art with a new life and create a new, emancipated spectator.

Images from the Exhibition

Photos courtesy CRICOTEKA / Zbigniew Prokop, Krzysztof Kućma

See the gallery below to view images from the exhibition. Click on the thumbnail to expand the slideshow.