Exhibition opening: 23th October, 7 PM

Curator: Joanna Zielińska

In 1954 in Leipzig Bildworterbuch Deutsch und Polnisch / A German-Polish Illustrated Dictionary was published. This book is a remarkable compendium of knowledge about the world at that moment, and at the same time a bold attempt to classify and describe concrete reality by means of entries, indexes, and charts. To render the dictionary more ordered, its authors introduced 15 parts to cover various domains of knowledge: from a political system, through economy, culture, to the human body and botany. The dictionary contains numerous language pitfalls and weaknesses in translation, which are the source of surprising information for a careful reader.

The publication became a starting point for Andrzej Tobis in creating a special archive of images.The artist searches the world around him for visual equivalents of the dictionary entries and photographs them. One of the conditions he made while working with the Polish edition of the German published dictionary was that all the photographed objects and situations should be sourced in the territory of Poland. In the A- Z (Educational Cabinets) series, 400 entries have been identified, nearly half of which have been realized in the form of educational cabinets. The collection is constantly increasing. Two years after the start of his project the artist came across the third edition of the dictionary, from 1967, which became an additional source of artistic analysis. The revised edition is a kind of addendum, where, according to the artist, we may observe the progress of civilization and the liberalization of ideological lines, although the contents of the book remain largely the same.

Each photograph of the A-Z (Educational Cabinets) series has been assigned with an entry in Polish and German along with an index number. The dictionary is nothing more than an excuse for the continuing search for the next entry and descriptions of the world around the artist. Andrzej Tobis’s photographs are created with an unusual care and a sense of humour and unveil the slippage contained in the words and their meanings, in the photographed images and the concepts assigned to them. These numerous shifts, ambiguities and undertones constitute the greatest value in the project. Tobis does not arrange situations, he just records his observed daily reality. Some of the photographs are portraits of people he met by chance. In these cases, as the artist says: if the photographed person asks me ‘How should I stand?’, I always answer ‘It’s up to you’ . The melancholy contained in the images presented is also very surprising, invoking nostalgic memories of a time that has passed – walking around the city, shopping in a local shop, or children’s games in a park.

Andrzej Tobis– born in 1970, a graduate of the Katowice Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow. He is above all known as a painter employing traditional methods. The first opening of the A-Z (Educational Cabinets) project took place in 2007 in Kronika Gallery in Bytom. The photographs were shown as a part of the artist’s individual exhibitions in Rome , Berlin and Dusseldorf and at several collective exhibitions. The exhibition in the Centre of Contemporary Art in Toruń is the largest presentation of the project so far.