16.10. — 21.12.2025

Kohta’s last exhibition period in 2025 is dedicated to the Kraków-based Polish artist Marek Chlanda (1954), who is well known for his drawings, other works on paper, sculptures and multi-media installations and has been active on the Polish and international scenes since the mid-1970s.

‘Art is not a private affair. If the motifs of my work are eminently personal and cannot become the motifs of the observer, then the work is invalid. Art needs your eyes against my wall.’1

Marek Chlanda wrote this in 1993. Then he was 39, now he is 71. He lives in Kraków where he has a studio, which I visited in February, but he also spends time in Konin in central Poland. He has access to a house there and has just had a new storage built for many of his works.

Most of them could and should be characterised as drawings or sculptures. His very first exhibition, in the Polish town of Cieszyn in 1976, was titled ‘The First Four Drawing Series’ but already the next one, ‘Series XIII’ in Kraków two years later, contained works such as Unnamed Sculpture (1977, now destroyed).

Chlanda has also made various kinds of installations and longer-duration projects, such as his School of Utopia in Kraków in 2017–18, in collaboration with his son Marcin, and collaborated with other artists, like when he made the work Dzień dobry/Buenos días together with the Spanish choreographer and dancer Elizabeth Brodin in 1995.

About his art-making he has said this, touching on both drawing and sculpture: ‘It’s true that I’m absolutely in favour of materialism. I believe that everything can be expressed through matter. Yet, on the other hand, I know that the essence of art lies in mystery. Thus, all the material means can barely touch on these things… To tell you the truth, I don’t have it all down yet. I’m just giving signals.’2

Chlanda has had a long international career, exhibiting at the Paris Biennials of 1980 and 1982 and at the first Gwangju Biennial in Korea in 1995, teaching in Bergen in the mid-1980s and maintaining studios in cities like Barcelona, Copenhagen, Ghent or Paris at different times. It would be unfair to call him a well-kept secret of the Polish scene, but this is somehow how it feels. Hardly any of my Polish fellow curators have brought Chlanda up in conversation, and when I have insisted to ask about him their reaction has usually been something like ‘I see you’ve done really deep research here.’

This insistence comes from my own experience of stumbling over his work, quite literally. I first saw it 30 years ago, in the group exhibition ‘Where Is Abel, Thy Brother?’ curated by Anda Rottenberg at Zachęta in Warsaw. It was a floor piece that I almost walked into, containing at least one plaster or cardboard mask with a long, beak-like nose and at least a few goose or peacock feathers stripped down to their pens and glued together to form antennae that somehow illustrated lines of flight or thought. I can’t double-check this memory image, because Chlanda himself has no photograph of this lost work and couldn’t even recall its title when I asked him about it.

My next chance encounter with him involved another floor piece. Made of wood, plaster and waxed cardboard, Via Condotti (1987) had found its way into the museum collection of M HKA in Antwerp and I had the chance to exhibit it there in 2012.

Why am I telling you these details? And why am I, after eight years of writing these press releases anonymously, suddenly addressing you with first-person intimacy? Because I can’t find a better way to introduce this highly subjective but also very timely exhibition. The correct answer to the question ‘Why Marek Chlanda in Helsinki now?’ is, I think, ‘When else?’ He has only exhibited in Finland once before, at the Biennale Balticum in Rauma in 1994. The world is becoming a more dangerous place and it is time for Kohta to share things that we would otherwise regret not having brought here. For me the fundamental principle of exhibition programming is this: Don’t try to guess what audiences want to see, offer them what you find extraordinary. There is a rather big chance that they will agree with you.

After having followed Mr. Chlanda’s work at a distance for 30 years, I wrote him a letter early this year and asked for a meeting. I told him that I was particularly captivated by Dobranoc (Goodnight), a series of originally seven sculptures that were first displayed in four dimly lit rooms at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw in 1996. Inspired by the eerie dream-like spirit and atmosphere in Goya’s Los Caprichos, these are hulky silhouettes of waxed cardboard held upright by metal hoops, with masks attaching themselves to them – or haunting them, or perhaps just slumbering, true to the nocturnal and corporeal nature of the ensemble.

Again, these masks are sprouting stripped feather antennae. ‘Something is coming out of my mouth, and it’s caught by your eyes and ears… How can this be shown? I came up with the idea of showing that vitality by way of the appendages leading out of the masks.’3

For our exhibition, Chlanda has managed to retrieve and restore two of the Goodnight pieces, thereby bridging the 29-year gap to another time, more different to ours than we probably wish to acknowledge. Showing them here and now is, to me, an attempt at creating an ‘underground connection’ with the freer and more optimistic 1990s, much like the ‘secret bond’ between Poland and Spain that Chlanda references by channelling Goya – and that Joseph Conrad, born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, mentioned in private letters. What the author of Heart of Darkness had in mind was the two countries’ struggle against their larger neighbours Russia and France.

In addition, Chlanda has brought together other sculptures that embody the post-conceptual searching of that distant period, from Untitled Sculpture No. 14 (1991) to Hasta la muerte (1996). Like the works in the Goodnight series, they are at the same time non-metaphorical (insisting on their physical and material presence) and theatrical (cloaking themselves in faint mystery).

To complete the connection between then and now, we also show some of Chlanda’s most recent works, for which he has used international maritime maps and fragments of various kinds of cardboard packaging cut and arranged into clusters speaking to us through organic geometry. They are part of a larger work in progress, started in 2024 and titled Environment (of Fury).

The exhibition is co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland, through the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, and by the Embassy of Poland in Helsinki. We are grateful for this support, and for the pleasant collaboration with Aneta Prasal-Wiśniewska at the Institute and Katarzyna Drozd at the Embassy.