Rafał Wilk. Find your way home

September 29, 2012 - November 24, 2012

At his Find Your Way Home exhibition, the artist does not point the way, at least not directly. It is more about the process of searching and discovering, and also about the journey as a metaphor for creative work. His perspective does not define a set point of station but rather branches out in multiple directions, refers to extremely diverse experiences and reflects the artist's broad range of interests. The Find Your Way Home exhibition appears a contemporary metaphor for the eternal existential questions: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? It also concerns our roots, our identity and our attitude towards history. Baumann's conception of liquid modernity which transforms us into "tourists" lucidly explains the human drive to explore and to search for the way home, the home which may be in many locations at the same time, like the places  we come from, live or work and our favourite travel destinations to which we keep returning over and over again. The exhibition also addresses the artist's itinerant mode of working, realised through the series of artist-in-residence programmes, while at the same time it revives the Romantic notion of journey as exploration centred on discovering and exploring other realms and cultures.

Rafał Wilk's Grand Tour through the Balkans may seem the leitmotif of his exhibition at the aTAK Gallery but the journey is but a pretext to interpret local histories – and often very personal stories. It provides the artist with an instrument to observe the world. Important to him are personal encounters with the locals with whom he discusses current issues, politics and living conditions. He experiences an extant reality through flavours and smells and in the end also through colour and light effects. Reminiscences of his trips through the Balkans appear in his art in the form of remembered scenes and views, films and photographs which often get translated into the language of painting. His Balkan trips provide him with a perspective on his own family history as his family arrived in the so-called Western or Reclaimed Territories (which had become part of today's Poland in the aftermath of World War II) in 1945 from Bosnia. This often forgotten past directs the artist's attention to events outside of the mainstream of official history.

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