There are 900 cities and 56.000 villages in Poland… The countryside has a special meaning in Polish culture, constituting a getaway, a place to hide, an area of freedom, space where various sects, communes and enclaves arise and open air workshops take place. Such an ambivalent attitude of inferiority complex and denial, intertwining with the fascination with folk tradition and the myth of a life in full harmony with nature, formed two equally strong stereotypes, black and white, that effectively conceal the true image of the countryside. Lucim lives on is a disorded collection,  refering to characteristics of folk art, such as deformations, disproportions, candidness, mixing contents and forms. A sort of a church fair that offers many ideas and visions.The Lucim lives on exhibition refers to the three most idealized motives concerning the country: home, nature and community, in relation to utopias that concern them. Paradise is a place that God gave to people, meanwhile utopias make the human vision of order real, realising the idea of a better life filled with happiness and deprived of poverty.Looking through the prism of space, objects, documents, traces, little details, the contemporary Polish artists participating in the project managed to create a modern commentary regarding different visions of rural utopias, from the ones put into practice as state-owned farms or biotechnological solutions, to those completely futuristic and unreal.

The idea of the exhibition originates from the celebrations of the 30th anniversary of the Lucim group, whose activity was truly exceptional in the field of visual art in Poland. The project itself is in contradiction with the formula of a retrospective, historical, museum exhibition. From one point of view, the title illustrates the spectacular continuity of the project, and from the other – relates Lucim activities to a variety of attitudes towards the countryside. The resulting polyphony of voices should bring the countryside phenomena back into art discourse and subject it to criticism. It will also allow to fully apprecciate the Lucim actions as a consistent and separate artistic way of BogdanChmielewski, Witold Chmielewski and Wiesław Smużny. The activity of Grupa 111 appears as a sort of utopia as well, for its motivation to renew the archetypal way of experiencing reality.

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