Marcin Chomicki

Marcin Chomicki (b. 1976) is by training an Assyriologist - a philologist of the ancient East, reading cuneiform script, Sumerian and Akkadian. This initiation into archaeology became the framework of his entire artistic practice: he treats contemporary Warsaw like an excavation site, and his tools - like objects that themselves call for description.

Since 2002 he has run the „Archive of Transformation” - a photographic documentation of Polish public space spanning more than twenty-three years. It is a record of the city understood as a labyrinth: a network of interpenetrating layers in which whole worlds - playgrounds from the times of the People's Republic, concrete installations, enclaves of nature - disappear within a year or two. Chomicki calls this an archaeology of the present: he documents the things that had no right to survive yet did, and those that seemed eternal yet are suddenly gone.

Together with Justyna Wencel he carries out interventions in urban space - including „0.5 km of Colour” on the footbridge linking the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art with Jazdów, and the installation „Labyrinth” in Wrocław (2016), referring to Oskar Hansen's theory of open form. In painting he builds compositions from hand-made gradients, which he calls „the simplest and most perfect form of chiaroscuro”. The op-art canvases of the „Labyrinth” cycle put the viewer's perception to the test: forms overlap so that it is impossible to tell what is in front and what is behind.

His visual vocabulary runs from the 3.5-inch floppy disk and the audio cassette, through Doom and the computer market on Grzybowska Street, to cuneiform script and the statues of Gudea. They are joined by a single intuition: the medium and the image are what decides whether a civilisation survives. „Things that were archaeological tools a moment ago have become the object of archaeology” - this sentence sums up the whole exhibition.

Chomicki belongs to the artists whose work becomes legible only from the perspective of the time it itself documents. „Screen Tears” is the first such full gathering of this twenty-year observation - a testimony to a transformation of which he was at once the chronicler and a part.