Upał

“Upał”, or “The Heat”, is a texto-video machine for accommodating a stifling surplus. Of energy. During the creative process the rising of temperature forces the mind to displace itself, and stand aside, opening up a chance for taking an angle, coming with a different approach. It is a properly ecstatic moment. And so – entrancement, astonishment, insanity / putting out of place / driving out of mind / and standing / making / being firm – all apply. “Upał” is a zine, heat, and much much more.

Noriaki is a streetart champion from Poznan, Poland. He’s the creator of the Watcher figure – in Poznan also known as Pan Peryskop (Mr Periscope) – a black, very plastic anthropoid that populates the walls of the major European towns, from London, through Berlin, to Barcelona. The Watcher has also more animalistic incarnations and also abstract-expressionist spillovers onto the canvas, its painting-pur experimentations in colour, gesture and texture, up to the very dissolution of figure. Powerful, benevolent and witty, and always amazingly tensile, Noriaki’s art per se problematizes the givens of the artistic field: staged seriousness, conceptual exclusivity, and institutional rites of passage. Time and again, it proves its potential to capture and rearticulate the present-day cultural energies and currencies, at the same time remaining inimitably his, Noriaki’s. And thus it maintains its rootedness in the great graffiti tradition: Watcher is a living letter, an idiom, id. A way of opening.

Pawel Jankiewicz is a writer from Sieradz, Poland, currently living and working in Berlin. He finished law studies in Gdańsk and Łódź with master's on art scandals and their normative entanglements. Drawing on practices of Polish critical art scene – its ethos of being involved in what is criticized, the guiding metaphor of the virus – his work develops a literary form that tends to come "from inside". This is done in order to revaluate the body and the bodily, the first-hand experience and language freed from hypertrophy of signification. Having a strong theoretical bent, his work remains open for the colloquial – it questions the cultural division between “high” and “low” culture and always asks the properly Gombrowiczian question: where is vitality? Today, the answer offered by his work reads: it’s with the art that doesn’t ask for permission. With zines, with graffiti, with stand-up poetry.

“Upał” encompasses this intuition, at the same time expanding figures and metaphors able to navigate through our predicament, i.e. overheating. Of climate, economy, politics, of libido and art.

The author has been engaged in numerous collaborations, from local literary circles (Hafenlesung, Fiction Canteen), through the streetart milieu (Szpagart), galleries (Art Stations, Tripp, PR145), psychoanalytical groups (LaLAB) and individual artists (Michael Hazell, Noriaki).