"Awake and Dream" Palazzo Doná

The title of the exhibition at the Palazzo Donà in Venice, Awake and Dream, hints at the painful sense of the world's emptiness (which does not let us dream) and the desire to attain full cognition of reality (which is a dream). This paradox produces tension, which inspires creativity. The exhibition set in this context is framed by the Collector's Cabinet (the collection of the Signum Foundation, Palazzo Donà) and the Spectacle of Venice (Venice Art Biennale). The conceptual guidelines for the display were set by the writings of Georges Perec.

The two great myths of the Western culture: the myth of Oedipus (see Katarzyna Kozyra's "Il Castrato") and the myth of Narcissus (in Jacek Malczewski's "Self portrait"), define, with a dose of bathos, the starting point for the display just as one enters the courtyard ("Narcissus, metaphor, costume"). After this introduction, we may enter the labyrinthine spaces of the exhibition.

One route leads us through the nooks and corners of the courtyard to a slight elevation, then down towards the canals. Let us call it, somewhat grandly, the space of cognition ("Books, copies, mythologies"). It is here, near the entrance, under the stairs, that we encounter a damp chapel of a heretic, a sordid laboratory of an alchemist, the very essence of dark and secret knowledge (Robert Kuśmirowski). [...] The works of the artists displayed on this level seem to be looking for or ridiculing the lost presence of God, Reason, Man, and Form.

Another route leads the visitor up the grand stairs, to the piano nobile and the private part of the palace. This route may be called, slightly ironically, the route of deconstruction and criticism, but also of passion, madness, excess. It is begun by a motto, explaining the rationale of the exhibition:

Wake up to dream... is the space spanning between the perilous emptiness of unspecified desire, fathomless perplexity, and the illusion of reality measured by the fascinating fullness of the spectacle played out before our eyes. The hidden message of this spectacle seems to be coming from all of those who have built a vicious circle of insatiable creation out of love and anger, passion and doubt, the desire to lose themselves and the risk of transgression, the acute dismay, and the futility of hope, the ardour of the body and the greed for power... Wake up to dream.

Besides the rooms whose scale predestines them to become natural expositional spaces, there are also some hidden places, which give the viewer a chance to experience the surprises and tensions that always accompany explorations involving the transgression of pricacy. Here on can view Jerzy Kujawski's erotic paintings, the library of Nicolas Grospierre, Tadeusz Kantor's paintings, Eustachy Kossakowski's iconic photograph of the "Sea Concerto" conducted by Edward Krasiński, and the set of photographs by Michal Martychowiec entitled "Destination: The Magic Mouncation", taken in early 2009. The sequence of images resembling film footage is a poetic metaphor of Thomas Mann's novel, "The Magic Mountain". Its protagonist , fascinated with the alluring mystery of death, takes for granted an altered dimension of time, different from that obtaining in the world he left behind. He gives himself to the passions compatible with this skewed perception of time: photography, collecting, excessive sexual activity.