Other side of the lens

The KRUPA's gallery exhibition offers a reflective space where identity, memory, and reality blur and dissolve. The works of the three artists – 
Marko Obradović, Patryk Staruch, and Łukasz Stokłosa – explore explore the role and subjectivity of the gaze, themes of alienation, the role of the observer and the observed, and the influence of pop culture on collective consciousness. It is a narrative without a clear beginning or end, leaving the viewer suspended between what is real and what is merely seen. It is a landscape shaped by fleeting impressions and emotional afterimages, where what is observed is always slipping away, and what remains is only a trace, a projection. 

The works of Obradović, Staruch, and Stokłosa navigate these in-between worlds with distinct yet resonant approaches. Obradović’s practice, infused with themes of abjection, transhumanism, and esotericism, creates speculative narratives that examine the ephemeral nature of identity and spirituality. His pieces suggest feelings of melancholy and claustrophobia, hinting at spaces both intimate and inaccessible, offering the viewer a glimpse into realities that are deliberately obscured. Patryk Staruch delves into the psychoanalytical undercurrents of cinema. Reimagining memories and dreams through cinematic language, his paintings question the power dynamics of the gaze and the fragile construction of self-image. Staruch’s canvases operate as disconnected yet strangely coherent frames of a never-made film, populated by dreamers, watchers, and the dreamt. Łukasz Stokłosa’s work reflects on the aestheticized ghosts of late capitalist fantasy. His fragmentary, glitch-like images evoke the faded opulence of the 1990s, exploring how collective desires, visual culture, and memory shape — and ultimately haunt — our perception of self and other. His figures hover between presence and absence, between acting and simply existing, becoming mirrors of a world both hyperreal and spectral. 

The exhibition loosely resonates with the psychological atmosphere of David Lynch’s Lost Highway, as well as the existential rebellion of the French New Wave. It examines alienation as a social reaction to an unstable reality, using dichotomies — life and death, reality and illusion, consciousness and unconsciousness — to unsettle our certainties. Rather than offering a linear narrative or a closed interpretation, exhibition invites viewers into a liminal zone: a space where reality is perpetually questioned, where memory merges with projection, and where the self becomes as fleeting and unfixed as the images that pass before our eyes and subconscious.