From Conceptual poem to concept-shape
In 1977 at the Foksal Gallery in Warsaw, the artist and poet Stanisław Dróżdż (1939–2009) exhibited an installation piece titled między (“between”). It consisted of a rectangular white box, roughly eleven feet tall, seventeen feet wide, and twenty-three feet long. Inside and out, this box was covered with the letters m, i, ę, d, z, and y, carefully distributed and arranged so that at no point could a viewer spell out the word między horizontally, vertically, or diagonally.
Strange orchestrations: Mira Rosenthal & the translation of silence
It was a place I might have dreamed if it hadn’t been real, this building slated for demolition located in a country far from home. The former site of an art college, the structure itself no longer stands, but one June evening in the early years of the twenty-first century, it hosted a party for the ages.
Each classroom transformed into an all-night gallery, filled with art by generations of students who had learned there how to see, how to listen, how to make. Studio after studio of imagination translated into reality. Outside, on the lawn: wine, feasting, revelry. The sharing of decades of memory. If you look closely, you can see gargoyles keeping watch over the festivities.