Kantor. Vision Therapy – Exhibition Opening

On 16 July 2025, the Tadeusz Kantor Documentation Centre Cricoteka opens a new collection exhibition – Kantor. Vision Therapy. Alongside works and unique archival materials related to Tadeusz Kantor’s art, the show will feature works by an international group of artists: Alexandra Bachzetsis, Aneta Grzeszykowska, Marysia Lewandowska, Nikita Kadan, Goshka Macuga, Christoph Schlingensief, the “List” 2020 collective and Gisèle Vienne.

Kantor. Vision Therapy is not another exhibition presenting the history of the Kraków-based artist’s achievements. It is conceived not so much as an attempt to reinterpret his legacy, but as a particular kind of “optical instrument” composed of Kantor’s works and contemporary artistic interventions. This instrument is meant to let us see the world – and ourselves – differently than we usually do. It aims to offer insight into those regions of reality we forget, choose not to remember, or whose image is distorted, disturbed, or deformed by collective traumas, political marketing, or the media.

War – both the one from 80 years ago and the one currently unfolding beyond our eastern border; the burden of the past and its use as a weapon against ideological opponents; dehumanization and the dangers of making the human being the measure of all things; identity as either a protective shield or an unwanted burden… The optical instrument into which Cricoteka’s gallery is transformed sharpens our gaze on reality – especially on that which we tend to overlook with relief.

The exhibition consists of six kaleidoscopic images: I is Someone Else, This Uncanny Everyday, Human Things, In the Shadow of a Catastrophe, Art is the Only Revolutionary Power, and Oblivion. Each refers to themes present in Kantor’s work, while also resonating with the experiences of today’s viewers. Their composition is governed neither by chronology nor by similarities in genre or form. Painting, drawings, stage objects, photographs from performances and happenings, films, and archival materials assemble like a kaleidoscope into temporary constellations, whose only purpose is to shake our perception out of numbness.

The exhibition was developed by Jarosław Suchan, invited by Cricoteka as the exhibition’s main curator; the institution’s curatorial team – Kamil Kuitkowski, Małgorzata Paluch-Cybulska, Magdalena Ujma, and Natalia Zarzecka – as well as, in the framework of curatorial collaboration, Thibaut de Ruyter. Work on the exhibition has been ongoing since 2023.