Duo with Adam Nehring

It is becoming increasingly difficult to shake off the impression that our physical reality plays a subordinate role to what can be said about it or how it can be sold. Artists Katarzyna Wyszkowska and Adam Nehring have chosen to explore this insight. They have sought inspiration from French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre in their book Enrichment, where they point out that Western economies have become increasingly dependent on the economics of enrichment. In this model, the price of goods does not derive from their physical properties, but from the narrative that enriches them. 

This concept of enrichment contains many layers of meaning, both in terms of income,   a monetary category, and the add-on content, status, or value attached to economic goods beyond their inherent qualities. This is best illustrated in luxury goods. The prestige they carry with them derives not from the cost of raw materials or labour, but from the status they convey and the opportunity to participate in the narrative they symbolise. 

The title of the exhibition is borrowed from the Polish translation of Vincenzo Latronico’s novel Perfection. The Polish title is To Perfection. The book looks at the lives of a couple of freelancers in the creative industry. They are presented in a way that omits their statements or agency. All attention is devoted to how the objects they own, the events they participate in, and the way they create their identities signal their membership in their peer group. Despite the seemingly endless possibilities of experiencing everyday life, they submit to the same narrative of superficial freedom and a cool, easy-going life, leading them to burnout and the need for change. 

Katarzyna Wyszkowska’s works are visual representations of the artist’s research on digital capitalism and self-creation regimes. The sculpture Samourelikwienie  [Autoreification] teases the subconscious desire to climb to the top of the career ladder and achieve a huge success, including financial success. Its form refers to Christian reliquaries, objects of worship designed to store the remains or objects belonging to saints. The agency contained in the title of the work is, of course, a paradox. No one becomes a saint during their lifetime, nor is it an autonomous decision. The cult of the individual is directly linked to external validation. Making yourself a relic is therefore an impossible act, and the physicality of the sculpture with its seemingly luxurious and expensive materials emphasises the fake in the common phrase: fake it till you make it. Wyszkowska’s attempt at making relics out of your own person can also be interpreted as creating your own self in relation to an object, or indeed, as an object. Moreover, it is a conscious and conspicuous act of self-creation. 

The Curtain is the embodiment of social media creation. The collage-like object collects afterimages of content that the artist associates with the trend of ‘romanticising life,’ performing unreal behaviours in front of the camera, created according to an illegible algorithmic feedback. Wyszkowska recreates a pattern in which social media users think and see themselves in the third person, from the outside, from a virtually designed perspective. She arranges frames and emulates everyday life. This is certainly not just a product of the present day alone. The mechanisms of self-elevation and self-aggrandisement are examined in Omnia, an installation of monumental gouaches that explore the historical aspects of building the myth of genius. 

Adam Nehring’s work Ja sam, w pojedynkę [I myself, Alone] offers a similar reflection on the tradition of self-creation. The viewer is placed in the position of a player in front of an interface with dialogue options based on classic stories proliferated by ‘self-made men’. Nehring metaphorically reveals the processes of building and concealing backgrounds, the personal stories of individuals who have built their grandeur on the back of wealth and connections, ‘from scratch’, generation after generation. These peculiar biographies are symbolised by a cemetery, in two meanings – as a family necropolis and a digital graveyard that unfolds human dependence on the mercy of algorithms. 

Adam Nehring’s paintings are filled with dense metaphors and references to political theories, the history of philosophy, high culture, and pop culture. The works presented in the exhibition not only contain a meta-narrative about the power system and the vicissitudes of great stories. They also reflect personal experiences and the accompanying feelings of disappointment and fatigue. The painting Vanishing depicts a painting n exhibition in a grove that seems to be beyond the reach of the human eye. The depicted situation reveals a longing for an authentic connection with the viewer, i.e., the opportunity to jointly experience reality beyond the self-creation technique framework. The nostalgia for community and relationship is represented by the repeated depictions of routers. 

Nehring uses the visuality of graveyards, tombs, and routers to make us look at two things: death associated with the past, ancestors, and commemoration, and immortal transgenerational narratives, collective memory, and the processes of history creation. 

While following Wyszkowska and Nehring, we can trace the transition from an attempt to create first-person stories to an approach in which narratives about people are written by themselves, as if from the third-person perspective of an average and universal reader-narrator. The proposition contained in Enrichment will help you organise the key observations, such as ‘the main resource of the enrichment economy is the creation and development of differences and identities’. Identity should be understood here in two ways: as an awareness of who one is and as sameness. 

Finally, Boltanski and Esquerre have put forward a hypothesis that the main fuel of the industrial revolution, coal, is what narrative and historical legacy are to the economy of enrichment. Both resources are a kind of accumulation or condensation of the past, and their exploitation transforms the entire economic landscape. 

Gabi Skrzypczak & Ida Dziublewska