Olga Kowalska, Xawery Wolski

Jednodobowe wróżby / 24-hour Fortune-telling, 2015

installation, performance

shop window at 53 Oliwska Street

 

In the shop window a temporary fortune teller’s workshop has been set up. The interior design draws on the aesthetics of esoteric, late‑night TV programmes.

The festival goers can contact the artists in the ‘studio’ using a CB radio, situated in front of the shop window. After lifting the receiver, each caller will hear a personalised one-off, horoscope, improvised by the artists. The pieces of fortune-telling are created spontaneously on the basis of subjective feelings and intuition, using such accessories as Tarot cards, a pendulum, a crystal ball and a lottery machine.

The pane of glass that separates the fortune‑telling workshop from the street acts in a similar manner to a TV screen, providing a boundary between the real world and the artificial super‑reality. The arrangement of the shop window exposes details of the production of TV images, demystifying the process and revealing its artificiality. The activity of the artists focuses on the demagogical nature of the media and on social behaviour that thrives on the vague and shaky images of the reality projected by the media. At the same time it points out the paradox: the presence of astrology and the esoteric in seemingly rational, pragmatic contemporaneity.

Olga Kowalska (b. 1992) – an intermedia graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, currently a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Performance, video and intervention in public space. She has participated in numerous Polish and international exhibitions and projects, including in Tallinn, Budapest, Warsaw and Krakow. Awarded in the national Polish competition Polish-Polish War Art Auction (2015).

Xawery Wolski (b. 1988). Studied graphics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. Film, animation, comics and sculpture. Founder of the group Więcej Światła and the group Spirala. Awarded at the Grolsch ArtBoom Festival competition (jointly with Hubert Gromny) and Hestia Artistic Journey 2014.