Gamer Exhibit in U-jazdowski?

Sorry, you will not encounter any paintings at the new exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, but you can play on the Xbox instead.

‘IF/THEN’ is a project by curators who explore internet cultures together: artist-programmer Sara Szostak and artistic director Marta Grytczuk, both associated with the Eternal PM foundation. It is also the first major collective exhibition at the Castle under the aegis of director Anna Łazar, who took up her post this year and announced a shift towards experimental media techniques.

The title itself is a nod to computer scientists and IT specialists, as it refers to the ‘if/then’ construct, a basic type of conditional statement, or a kind of ‘conditional mode of speech’ in various programming languages. It is the starting point for reflections on potentiality and the construction of narratives, both in games and beyond.

The basis of ‘IF/THEN’ is the game as a key to interpreting reality, where the virtual and the real are no longer separate.

Some of the objects presented at ‘IF/THEN’ formally refer to the language of computer games. Jan Możdzyński's ceramic sculptures, for example, imitate collectible figurines from one such franchise. Roughly half of the objects in the large exhibition space can be considered, more or less, to be actual games.

There are PC games, such as Julia Frolova and Anna Bidzilia's one that collects our dreams, Jane Schimmel's consoles overgrown with matter, games played with an Xbox or PlayStation controller, such as Sara Bezovšek and Dorijan Šiško's ‘Blackbox’, and Andrei Isakov's VR car ride.

Such form encourages to sit down and interact with the artworks, deciding individually what they will ultimately mean to and how they will be remembered. This time, it is the audience who are given the opportunity to answer the questions thrown at them at every other contemporary exhibition: Where do myths come from (2Girls1Comp)? What even is cultural identity (Sonia Górecka)? And what kind of future awaits us (Bezovšek and Šiško)?