May 14 (Thursday), 6:00 PM
Karol Józwiak, PhD
Ordinary Things: The Art Collection as an Expression of Identity
During this year’s Museum Night, we invite you to a talk exploring art and cultural memory. Can a work of art be something ordinary — close to everyday life, shared, and helping to build a sense of identity?
Museums and galleries surround artistic creation with an aura of exceptionalism. In today’s “temples of art,” artworks often appear as extraordinary entities, requiring focused attention and a detachment from everyday life.
At the same time, art grows out of lived experience—its value rooted in what is universal, shared, and, in a sense, ordinary. It connects the immediacy of everyday life with a form that elevates that experience.
The aim of building a collection is to bring out this “ordinariness”—what is common—from a multitude of individual works. The coherence of a collection depends on a balance between what is singular and unique and what is universal. This “ordinariness” can be understood in relation to identity: the strengthening of cultural bonds grounded in shared symbols and values.
Set within the context of the remarkable collection of the Pilsudski Institute, this meeting offers an opportunity to reflect on these ideas through specific works of art. In the form of an informal talk combined with a guided tour of the exhibition, we will seek to find a balance between the uniqueness of individual objects, their ordinariness, and the sense of identity that this collection evokes.
Dr. Karol Jóźwiak is an art historian and cultural studies scholar affiliated with the Universities of Wrocław and Łódź. His research focuses on Polish art and culture from a transnational perspective, the cultural diplomacy of the Cold War period, and selected issues in the history of Polish art, film, and photography. He is the author of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Concept of the Language of Reality (2019) and co-author of Records of Memory: The Histories of Zofia Rydet (2020). He has curated exhibitions devoted, among others, to the work of Zofia Rydet and Andrzej Różycki, and initiated the creation of the Andrzej Różycki Photozophical Archive at the University of Łódź.
