I can do that too

“I can do that too”
“I can't do that”
 
The entire exhibition unfolds between these two sentences.
The modern circulation of images and opinions has given rise to the figure of the universal expert. The ability to express oneself instantly means that a statement often takes the place of experience. Judgement comes faster than an attempt, and certainty requires no verification.
I
The exhibition treats these two statements not as commentary, but as a starting point for action.
In one strand, the viewer is placed in a test situation. Repeatable kits for creating images oneself, resembling ready-made products, contain outlines and the basic tools to fill them in. The slogan suggests ease, but the lack of instructions leaves the decision up to the recipient. The act of carrying out the work becomes, at the same time, a test, a declaration and a moment of potential withdrawal.
At the centre of this situation stands Salamon’s reworked Laocoön Group, functioning not as a model to be imitated, but as a point of confrontation between the imagination of one’s own capabilities and the experience of them.  What appears to be clear turns out to be ambiguous. What was supposed to be simple is starting to prove difficult.
At the same time, there are images that employ the repetition and reworking of canonical representations. They function as versions, translations and shifts. Their status remains uncertain, and their presence is duplicated by reproductions that introduce them into wider circulation. The relationship between the original and the copy is no longer stable.
The second strand of the exhibition stems from a different experience. In Aldona Karczmarczyk’s works, rather than declarations, there is fascination, admiration and the accompanying awareness of absence. Paintings and sculptures are appropriated through photography, often intuitively, as fragments of others’ works captured within the frame. This gesture is both an attempt at rapprochement and a form of appropriation, in which what belongs to others becomes, in part, one’s own.