An international jury declared Janek Simon the winner of this year’s Views, the Prize for Young Polish Art. The 10.000 € prize is a joint project between Deutsche Bank Foundation and the Zacheta National Gallery in Warsaw.
Janek Simon combines a “charming lightness” with subversive strategies. Many of his projects are charcterized by an anarchist wit, e.g., when he gave lectures on edible plants or the art of lock picking.
In Madagascar, Simon initiated a Polish year including an art exhibition – though without any participation of Polish artists. For Views, Simon exposes absurd, beetle-like creatures made of bread and metal in the halls of the museum. These low-tech constructions crawl on the floor and eventually gather around some sort of shrine: an old TV set whose program is determined by a video mixer that blends the images of two TV channels. The mixing creates the impression of a shifting of reality, of a psychedelic disturbance of the obvious and everyday. Perhaps this work makes obvious reference to political realia and the metaphor of manipulation, but more important seems the theme of an experimentation with the everyday, of an activity beyond schemata.
http://www.culture.pl/en/culture/artykuly/wy_wy_spojrzenia_2007
