Ewa Bobrowska, Philosopher's Room
7.02. – 8.03.2025

curator: Grzegorz Borkowski

OPENING: Friday, 7.02.2025 at 6 pm

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION:

How can visual art and contemporary philosophical reflection meet? What correspondence between these humanities will not be some form of illustrating philosophy? "The Philosopher's Room" assertively touches on this question by creating an imaginative sphere inspired by Jean-François Lyotard's essay "Clouds." It draws on the scientific competence of Ewa Bobrowska, both a contemporary artist and a philosopher, author of a Polish translation of the essay, as well as theoretical publications and anthologies of philosophical texts.

The artist has transposed the narrative structure of Lyotard's "Clouds," combining threads from seemingly unrelated areas into the exhibition space modeled on the environment. This allows one to explore all exhibition elements in any order and create one's narratives. Meanwhile, the visual motif of cloud photography, unconventional lighting, and sound imbue the whole space with a oneiric character. As a result, "The Philosopher's Room" creates the impression of a space for thinking, which often takes place in regions of the personality that are also strongly activated during sleep.

Thoughts are like clouds. They don't really have mental roots; they feed only on the attention we give them. And yet, when an exceptional person engages with them, important hypotheses emerge that renew questions about the meaning of existence and temporality. While "The Philosopher's Room" envisions a space for thinking, it does not aim to recreate a specific room; instead, it is a visual metaphor for the place where a philosopher lives, rests, sleeps, and works, and is, therefore, not just a philosopher's office. It also signals visual inspirations, stages of intellectual work, and a kind of imprisonment in one's own persuasions, worldview, conceptual grid, and mode of reflection. Affirming intellectual work, it also metaphorically points out the ambivalences associated with it – limitations, perhaps stemming from the philosopher's biography, as well as his male point of view […]

Conceived and executed in this way, "The Philosopher's Room" also enters into a dialogue with the history of the Foksal Gallery in the first decades of its activity, when the relationship between art and intellectual research was an essential feature of the gallery's program. The exhibition continues this theme in a different, suggestive way that touches the senses. Although it is a statement marked by the imagination of a female artist and philosopher, it does not draw on the familiar idioms of "female sensibility"; instead, it discreetly plays and polemicizes with them. Ewa Bobrowska follows a separate path. Synthetically, it can be defined as follows: what is conceptual in philosophical discourse, the artist transforms into sensual perceptibility, subject to direct and varied experience. The conceptual becomes realized here as an object or image.

BIO

Ewa Bobrowska – visual artist, aesthetician, philosopher. She holds a PhD in Fine Arts from the University of Arts in Poznań and a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Warsaw. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California. She works on artistic creation and analysis of contemporary philosophical reflection. She works as an assistant professor at the Faculty of Media Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, where since 2013 she has been collaborating with prof. Krzysztof Wodiczko, co-running the artistic Studio of Public Domain Art, and also conducting theoretical seminars. Her artistic works have been exhibited, among others, at: Zachęta, CSW in Warsaw, Trafo in Szczecin, Salon Akademii, Muzeum Mazowieckie, Akademickie Centrum Designu in Łódź, Fordham University in New York, University of California in Irvine, Muzeum Sztuki in Castello and Nova Sin Gallery in Prague. She is also the author of the books “Parateoria. The California Irvine School" and "UCI Critical Theory and Contemporary Art Practice: Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Bruce Nauman, and Others" and editor of the anthology "California Critical theory. An Anthology of Translations".