Paweł Kwiek. Time Difference

opening: 16th of Nov., 7-9 PM

exhibition: 17th of Nov - 16th of Jan.

Paweł Kwiek’s exhibition Time Difference features photographs and films created during two decades of the artist’s activity. The common denominator of the presented works is their marginal position vis-à-vis Kwiek’s main area of interest at the time: analytical and conceptual art. These pieces anticipate the artist’s later turn towards spirituality and metaphysics.

Instead of offering answers, the works on display pose questions – they address the mysterious, the inaccessible and the unobvious, as well as the subjective. The selection of the pieces is somewhat of a curatorial provocation – according to Marika Kuźmicz, who has worked with Kwiek’s archive since 2009, these are the works that most often pose difficulties to art historians and critics writing about them as they escape an all-too-easy classification and may thus prove challenging for researchers. The reason are Kwiek’s often very direct references to the question of faith as well as his personal existential dramas and mystical sensations that he experienced, as prominently exemplified by the works Perception of The Lack of Diversity (1978) and Conversation with God (1990).

The former provides a photographic record of a several-day-long meditation session at the Mała Gallery in Warsaw. Towards the end of the 1970s, during the final years of the Workshop of the Film Form, co-founded by Kwiek, the artist engaged in an intensive yoga practice and turned almost completely to creating ephemeral works. The latter piece from the early 1990s is a performance-for-camera that re-enacts the eponymous conversation with God, which Kwiek claims to have experienced around that time.


Paweł Kwiek (b. 1951)

Graduate of the Direction of Photography and TV Production Department at the Film School in Łódź. Co-founder and member of the Workshop of the Film Form in 1970–1980. Kwiek lectured at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (1977–1978) and the Film School in Łódź (1978–1981). A forerunner of video art in Poland, experimental filmmaker, video artist, photographer, drawing artist and author of manifestos, Kwiek’s artistic activity incorporates a range of disciplines of art, culture and science: philosophy, cybernetics, poetry, sociology. His works belong to the collections of the CCA Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Erste Foundation in Vienna, among other institutions.