Filmoteka Muzeum

In 2003, Warsaw’s gallery Dom Artysty Plastyka hosted Oskar Hansen’s exhibition “Open Form. Background of Events – Let’s Look at Ourselves”. Inside the gallery, Hansen located a spatial structure, which was to showcase the visitors to the exhibition. The work was based on the concept of the “perceptive background”, one of the elements of Hansen’s Open From. The concept was based on the premise that instead of dominating its surroundings, a space shaped by an architect should highlight the variety of the events unfolding therein.

Hansen wrote about the exhibition as follows: “this is one more attempt [since 1955] to answer what is now a common question: to be or to have? My answer is: to be, and, as far as my profession is concerned, to shape space with visual structures so as not only to look, but also to see. To see the most important thing in space – the human being, who is so difficult to make out, to distinguish from the chaos of the object-littered, object-cluttered space of Closed Form that surrounds us today. Here, in this laboratory space, visitors are subjects, and at the same time viewers and actors taking active part in a cognitive analysis of the human figure displayed by a formally absorptive, anti-materialistic background – Open Form.”

(Excerpt from: Towards Open Form / Ku Formie Otwartej, ed. J. Gola, Foksal Gallery Foundation, Revolver, Warsaw 2005, p. 143.)

                                                                                                                            (AK)