Jan Domicz

Plotters I

ECHO, Cologne
24 February - 25 March, 2023

For Plotters I, Jan Domicz, presents two videos and a series of objects. The narrative at hand is formally and conceptually linear. The gallery space is turned outward: when entering ECHO you are looking at people who are looking at the art. You must go around the exhibition to actually see it. The office used to be in the back room and is now in the central exhibition space. The architecture is considered carefully to lead the viewer’s sight: the windows uncovering the street surroundings are always in the background of Domicz’s works. The viewers are, therefore, compelled to look through the context.

ECHO is a gallery-sharing concept. The space belongs to everyone and at the same time to no one. It is owned collaboratively by galleries that change yearly. In that sense, it invokes a communal house (WG, Wohngemeinschaft). The sensibility of coexistence, problematic sharing and owning is essential for Domicz.

The videos build on the artist’s interest in the interchangeability of property. The narrator says “seriality is the truest experience of helplessness”. The progressive multiplication of the original – a mailbox, a room, an architecture – increases its value while alienating it from its roots. Domicz invites this dilemma in his art and responds to it with a constant misplacing and displacing of found objects. Facts mean less than the whole system.

Mela Miękus