Artworks/Father’s Moon Album

Wojciech Kucharczyk

Father’s Moon Album

Wojciech Kucharczyk combines new media art and conceptualism with electronic music and theatrical works. He was one of the first artists in Poland to take advantage of the possibilities offered by the internet, by creating experimental websites and gifs. Father’s Moon Album brings together the artist’s interests in various disciplines, from film, graphic design and new media in the visual arts, to geography and astronomy.


Father’s Moon Album consists of framed pages of a stamp album with a collection of postage stamps designed by the artist. Each of them has an image of the moon. The album was conceived and executed as an element of the set design for Lech Majewski’s 1997 film The Roe’s Room. It is an adaptation of an earlier experimental opera by Majewski and Józef Skrzek about the life of a family of three in an old tenement house which is invaded by nature: deer wander around the living room, and everything is overgrown with moss. The father of the family is an avid philatelist and often peruses his stamp album. This object consists of over four hundred stamps arranged in series. Kucharczyk described his method as follows: “I worked mainly on the computer, at the time only making baby steps in this medium. I scanned, drew, and combined samples from different eras. Typography is also an important component here. All of the stamps were then printed and photocopied in color for reinforcement. Before dividing the sheets, the whole family punched the paper around the prints with needles to add the perforation so characteristic of postage stamps, and to make everything look real.”


The album served as a prop in the film. It was not shown as an autonomous work of art until 2019, in Kucharczyk’s individual exhibition Is It a Dream or Reality?! No, It’s Sumatra!, curated by Małgorzata Miśniakiewicz and Joanna Rzepka-Dziedzic. It is an example of the artist’s early work, a reflection on globalization and on the changes in communication and socioeconomic relations after 1989. Poland was opening up to the world. Previous virtual travels with a finger on the map, and collecting stamps from distant countries, a popular hobby in communist Poland, were replaced by real trips with passport in hand (a document previously available to only a few) and the era of low-cost airlines.


(S.C.)







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Father’s Moon Album