Czuwający, 2020
The eponymous Watcher is a fictional monster, which embodies the exhaustion, doubts and fears that haunt contemporary late capitalist, neoliberal societies. The concept of the work emerged as a result of the artist’s personal experience of precarious work and the accompanying feelings of anxiety about his future, constant fatigue, a sense of creative burnout, lack of agency towards the surrounding reality. The monster has the shape of an office chair, i.e. an object on which we currently work, rest, think and experience the world. We repeat certain activities every day sitting in front of the screens As time goes by, we become increasingly attached to the chair, mutate into a new organism, in which the most important organ is the eyes gleaming with blue light and the hands connected to them; the other organs no longer matter, replaced by a chair – the best and most reliable skeleton of our age.
photo: Małgorzata Kujda