Piotr Lewandowski
Lightworkers
01-05.06.2025
It is hard to describe being, especially being with someone. What is hidden in the body is sometimes elusive, often contained in gestures, in sheer presence. When darkness falls, we are unable to see each other, but we still know that we are together. It is accepted that the path towards light is a journey towards enlightenment. If I embrace something with my gaze - I will get to know it, if I know something - I will understand it. Western culture has permanently seized upon the sun’s rays and its warmth to its advantage, equating it with intellectual cognition. Reason has pushed aside the sensuality of the body, its fleshiness and relationality.
Lightworkers is an experiential-artistic situation arranged by Piotr Lewandowski in the space of the Rodriguez Foundation, which deconstructs the symbolism of light encoded in Western culture. It ceases to be something external, distant from man. In the artist’s interpretation, it results from being itself.
The main element of the exhibition is a spatially presented dockcam performance.
Light flickers between fingertips, diffuses on the skin, emerges from the human centre. It is a medium that emerges from its corporeal shell, finding an outlet. Performers make it a vehicle for meaning, thus replacing traditional communication. Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson has noted that it is light that allows individuals to experience space collectively, as it integrates our perception and accompanies from behind every relationship produced. It is difficult to describe the touch of the body, even more so the touch of light. It touches the skin or comes out of the performers’ guts. There is a certain discomfort in this - is each of us capable of emanating light? Or rather, to perform the act of making our own presence visible?
Other objects on display in the exhibition serve to deepen the immersion of the viewers. The 400 lux is a circle that reacts to the intensity of sound detected in the gallery space. The greater it is, the more visible is the collective that produces it. Indeed, 400 lux is the light intensity value to which sunrises and sunsets with a cloudless sky correspond. What is natural comes back to the people again; they are the perpetrators of the flare. On the window, however, there is a site-specific installation that transforms the sun’s external rays and adapts them to the spatial conditions of the gallery, making them visible.
Most important, however, is the presence of the audience, who are thrown into a space that requires nothing. In contemporary spirituality, the term ‘Lightworkers’ refers to people ‘working with light’ as energy, seeking to heal and transform consciousness. As the artist states: „contemporary culture and art, this is precisely why it is so interesting, because it proves that it is possible to create a space that is sensitive to both individuality and collectivity. It is about causality and consequences, about how we combine thinking and acting. What lies in between these activities? In my opinion, it is experience, which is endowed with responsibility. By experiencing we become part of the world, and by having a part in it, we share responsibility”. It can be said, then, that the myth of the Platonic cave falls - light is not sought outside, but inside. All that is needed for this is a co-experience that reveals that the truth lies within our proximity.
Curatorial text: Monika Czyżniewska
Diploma exhibition realised under the supervision of Dr. Konrad Kuzyszyn
Magdalena Abakanowicz University of Arts in Poznań, Photography Department
Projekt dofinansowany z budżetu Miasta Poznania
