Exhibition series “What do we take with us?” at the Polish Institute: smartphones to eat

Trolls troll our everyday lives. Mostly unnoticed, they stir up a fog of information in digital realms that we have difficulty penetrating and are often unable to consciously perceive. In Celina Kanunnikava’s pictures, the invisible digital images take shape. But not as a cute illustration of the mythological demons, but as “White Noise”, also the title of the exhibition at the Polish Institute as part of the six-part series “What do we take with us?”

Kanunnikava has littered the canvas with myriads of small dots in the white-gray-black range, which aggregate into a kind of snow flurry or whose density of dots is reminiscent of the disturbing images on historical televisions. But the artist, born in Poland in 1988, aims at the concrete present. It addresses topics such as emancipation, surveillance or abuse of power or the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine.

Her work “Report from the Battlefield” was created in 2015. Painted in response to Putin’s annexation of Crimea the year before. However, any form of reporting is lost in the black and white noise of the countless dots. Only a prominent red dot suggests the supposed live broadcast – without any information content.

“White noise”, originally an acoustics term for noises in the uniform, low frequency range, is now also finding its way into psychosocial contexts such as psychoacoustics or relaxation training. In technology, it minimizes disruptive noise, and it can have a calming, meditative effect on people.

In the case of so-called social media, which young people in particular now use as their preferred source of news, truth, disinformation and fake news condense into a cacophony that takes on a sedating function in times of almost unmanageable information. In contrast, the exhibition aims to set an example and awaken people, to raise the viewer’s awareness of the subtle, sometimes obvious machinations.

Vitalii Shupliak points directly to the dangers of digital instruments. The artist, who was born in Ukraine in 1993 and studied in Poznań and Braunschweig, builds objects and installations out of smartphones, whose surfaces he holds up to us as distorting mirrors or which he covers with chocolate. What initially tempts you to bite into, looks like tasty brittle or nuts, turns out to be a devious seduction made from broken glass.

Shupliak aims at the addictive potential and the penetration of our everyday life, which is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve without digital extensions to our existence. The mobile all-rounders have long since become “objects of daily cult,” as Kanunnikava calls one of her acrylic paintings, the dots of which are simply made up of the RGB color space system with the primary colors red, green and blue.

“The exhibition series ‘What do we take with us?’ should mark a new beginning!” says curator Marta Smolińska. In this sense, the second edition “White Noise” about disinformation and fake news takes up a core aspect of Poland’s EU Council Presidency, during which the six-month period in office focuses, among other things, on the security of information. Smolińska would like to appeal to a new audience with her exhibition series.

In fact, things had become quiet around the Polish Institute during the time of the PIS government. Since Prime Minister Donald Tusk took office, a breath of fresh air has been blowing through the cultural institution. “After eight years of political influence, we have reclaimed the space,” says the busy and well-connected art historian, who works as a professor and head of the Chair of Curatorial Studies and Theories of Art at the Magdalena Abakanowicz University of the Arts in Poznań.

Most recently, she worked as a co-curator on the exhibition “Zerreißprobe” at the Neue Nationalgalerie. The start of her exhibition series was “Turning Point(s) and What Next?”, an artistic look into the recent past. Photographs by Karin Sanders, taken in Lódz, Poland in 1990 under the title “White Passageways”, were shown, as well as subtle neon messages by Michał Martychowiec and photographs of historical milestones. Now there’s a white noise.