The Eye Never Sleeps 2018

Non-Accidental Meetings
The Eye Never Sleeps – Kuyavian-Pomeranian
THE FACE AND THE MASK
01.07.2018– 04.07.2018
The Ostromecko Palace / The Municipal BWA Gallery in Bydgoszcz/ Dwór Artusa in Toruń

The International Non-Casual Eye Never Sleeps Meetings will be held in 2018 for the fifth time. From the beginning, we have treated the meetings as a celebration of all visual arts, hosting many outstanding artists since its inception. Through discussions, lectures, concerts, presentations, many later joint projects involving artists and scientists from all over the world have been created. In 2018, the event will be held at Ostromecko Palace, Artus Court in Toruń and bwa City Gallery in Bydgoszcz. The main theme is “Face and Mask,” and the ideological basis was developed by Professor Zbigniew Mikolyko:

“The aspiration to tear off one’s mask at all costs and show one’s ‘true face’ has, for about half a century, become one of the most important precepts of the modern world, one of the dogmas of today’s culture almost. It has become a knotty and binding problem of art and literature and various branches of knowledge (philosophy, psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology or theology). Above all, it has become a challenge of our lives and a principle, which is given more and more power and importance by mass culture, and even more by virtual reality, in which one tries to reach often drastic forms of pursuit of oneself, of authentic “being-in-the-world”, or even compulsively, in countless images, to manifest the “truth” about one’s life. And run away from what is a “mask” in us towards what is a “face”.

This applies both to the public spheres of life and to privacy or intimacy. It applies to global or universal space, as well as local communities, local culture. And it makes the boundaries between what is public and what is intimate and personal – as well as between what is universal and what is local – wobble enormously, become blurred, obliterated, anomie. And the reaction to such a state of affairs necessarily becomes utopian nostalgia – a longing for a return to privacy, separateness, existence on the edge of the road, within the old boundaries established by tradition. But this utopian choice does not at all invalidate the age-old questions of authenticity and inauthenticity, of illusion and truth, of what constitutes our face and what constitutes our mask.

So does the mask obscure or expose? It hides our true face, our innermost self – or on the contrary: does it reveal our nature, show our real aspirations and qualities? Such especially, which we are not aware of and which we often do not even want to know, which we do not want to know? Can we do without a mask at all, in order to live an authentic and unadulterated life, a “naked life”? And finally, is art, as some say, simply a mask? And if so, is it simply an illusion, or is it a paradoxical path to authentic existence and truth that we can’t or don’t like to remember in our daily existence?

Regardless of how we answer similar questions, the face and the mask have an extremely close relationship. A relationship that signifies one of the basic existential dramas: the constant and disturbing quest to discover – first of all from oneself, but also from others – one’s own meaning and the unadulterated reality of one’s self, condemned to struggle with the “not-self,” with what is foreign and not-me in me. It is no coincidence, after all, that the Latin word persona, meaning a theatrical mask in ancient times, has over time become synonymous with a person, therefore, with what is in us that is separate, unique, belonging only to us.

The next – the fifth – “The Eye Never Sleeps” will attempt to face this vast, dramatic and fascinating circle of motifs, questions, problems. With their expression in the art and thought of the latest and the older, in their global dimension and in the manifestations of local culture, with experiencing and living them both in collective existence and in the private or even intimate one.”

All the activities, as well as the meetings themselves, are organized by the Black Dwarf art group and the Black Dwarf Foundation, which brings together about 100 people from at home and abroad.