This Is a Fantastic Hole
Optical site-specific installation at Baszta Gallery, Kraków
This Is a Fantastic Hole is an optical, site-specific intervention based on the principles of camera obscura and a system of mirrors, penetrating the walls of Dworek Białoprądnicki and Baszta Gallery in Kraków. By reintroducing external daylight—absent from the ruins of the sixteenth-century tower—the installation temporarily restores light to its underground spaces.
On the foundations of the tower, visitors observe people and everyday life unfolding in the main courtyard. The real-time projection creates an opportunity for contemplation of the outside world from the hidden underground interiors of the tower.
Curator: Artur Wabik
Baszta Gallery, Kraków, June 2019
Mirrors – a word like a boomerang comes back to the considerations of many philosophers who deal with commonly understood culture. And therefore cultural anthropologists as well. I think that word especially used in a meta-metaphoric sense has been a source of inspiration. It’s about another anthropological term – that is the so-called The other. The other is another person, in contact with whom you can only realize yourself. The other is like a mirror in which we look at each other, thus making it possible to discover our identity. Finally, you can change the existing names and give new ones to others, making meaningful displacements and expanding your own interpretive apparatus.
The more mirrors, the more reflections – and the wider the picture. A mirror in the literal sense enables illumination of dark spaces. A clever arrangement of a series of mirrors served the ancients to illuminate the interiors hidden in the darkness. The masters in this play were the ancient Egyptians. We can only assume and make a literary vision of what kind of pride and mysticism that skill has inflicted on them – when the brilliance from the source of all life, through mirrored machinations, illuminated their sacred crypts during sacred mysteries.
Bartolomeo Koczenasz in his installation ”This is a sensational hole”, arranged in the basements of Dworek Białoprądnicki, combined these two functions of mirrors. The play of lights, directed in a neat way using mirrors, is the mechanical use of technical possibilities of long history, which at the same time prompts reflection on the perception, phenomena and nature of cognition.
Jan Barański
Galeria Baszta is an intimate site-specific gallery operating in the underground spaces of the Renaissance Dworek Białoprądnicki complex. Its interior is formed by the preserved ruins of a 16th-century defensive tower—raw limestone walls deprived of daylight, marked by successive phases of destruction and reconstruction. Repeatedly affected by historical events (including the Swedish Deluge), the site has been designated for cultural use since the 1950s and has functioned as a contemporary art gallery since 2018.
Baszta was conceived as a space in which architecture is not a neutral backdrop but an active partner in the artwork. Silence, semi-darkness, and the material memory of the site impose constraints that become creative impulses—each realization emerges in direct dialogue with the history and physicality of the space.