Jakub Kanna, Julia Walkowiak, Julia Woronowicz, Laura Radzewicz, Mari Ferrario, Miłosz Rygiel-Sańko, Wojtek Nika i Xu Yang

The exhibition ‘Absence of Protagonists’ is a result of a students workshop by the guest studio, led in 2021/22 by Iza Tarasewicz at the Intermedia Department of the Poznań University of Arts.

“Unhappy the land that needs heroes” 
– Bertolt Brecht, “The Life of Galileo” (1939) sc. 13

In traditional western narratives, the reader is encouraged to identify with a singular protagonist, a hero defined by agency, free will, and psychological depth, who undergoes an evolution and resolves problems as the story progresses from beginning, middle, and end. Our world today can be characterized as one of continuous crisis and uncertainty, from the COVID pandemic to increasing environmental collapse, from war in Ukraine and elsewhere to the ongoing physical and symbolic violence brought about through the intersection of economic, geopolitical, gendered, sexual, and racial injustice. Given this crisis, there is a tendency to look for new heroes who would simply save us from the problems of today. Yet it is precisely this heroic “monomyth”, the idea that all problems are personal and they’re all solvable by a singular, dramatic individual, that has distracted us from the possibility of deeper, broader change or of holding accountable the powerful who create and benefit from the status quo and its myriad forms of harm. The artists in the exhibition “Absence of Protagonists” contest these simplified conceptions of identity and agency, addressing feelings of disillusionment, confusion, and disharmony to destabilize the fantasies of a singular saviour and its imbrication in the harmful myths of our contemporary era. The systems that we struggle against in the contemporary world, that MUST be struggled against, will not be brought down by a lone hero. Refusing to be seduced by toxic subjectivities and the lure of personality, these artists use a variety of media and formal strategies to make visible and confront the problems of today, and to imagine new narrative forms and ways of living and being in our time of chaos. The very absence of protagonists, antagonists, and simple plots curiously brings the individuals to the forefront, displaying the intricate complexity, mundanity, and subjectivity that make us all who we are.
– Post Brothers