Yuriy Biley opens this year’s series of contemporary art presentations in public space – Windows’22 – with a work presented at 2 Staszica street. Biley studies Polish identity in the field of visual culture. In a series of collages stylistically referring to the political propaganda of the end of the 20th century, the artist presents an imaginary, alternative, lost or future Poland.
The source of the series of digital collages are photographs by Władysław Hasior from his Photographic Notebook, mainly made in the 1970s. While traveling around Poland, Hasior documented the “new language”, which was part of the party landscape, which he himself called “roadside poetry”. Biley’s works show the steadfastness of the language of propaganda and its disturbing topicality. They emphasize the importance of language in public space. Biley “updated” the pieces documented by Hasior, replacing single words with each other, updating them in line with the dynamics of the current public debate.