POLSKA IN BETWEEN - FEAST OF WORDS
2nd ISTANBUL DESIGN BIENNIAL 2014
Six hundred years ago, or maybe even earlier, envoys began to deliver diplomatic letters and documents from Polish kings to Turkish sultans and from Turkish sultans to Polish kings.
Most of them were hand written, and with no doubt were also pieces of beautiful calligraphy. However not only diplomatic documents were written during six centuries.
We have many travelogues, reports, diaries, memoirs, chronicles, essays, articles, poems, maps. . . Thousands of words were written, millions of letters. The times were changing and the words were changing. And the letters, too.
Words are crucial for any relations among people. So is food. Talking and eating. A feast. Yet a feast needs crockery. That's why we've combined calligraphy with ceramics, with porcelain plates. Although words can build bridges between people, they can also build walls and precipices. When we don't understand the meaning of words, we feel upset, frustrated and isolated. So we have deprived words of meaning and dispersed them into single letters, thus transformed them into sheer ornaments. Then they began to speak their own language, the universal language of abstract visual art.
In Polish language words of Turkish origin are not rarities. One of them is DYWAN – a carpet. We know that Turkish divan means also a collection of poems which in former times was also a piece of beautiful calligraphy, a feast for both the spirit and the eyes. What you can see here is our divan – a ceramic carpet – a collection of porcelain plate-poems.
This our interpretation of the East. This is the next stage of the never-ending “journey to the East”.
Most of them were hand written, and with no doubt were also pieces of beautiful calligraphy. However not only diplomatic documents were written during six centuries.
We have many travelogues, reports, diaries, memoirs, chronicles, essays, articles, poems, maps. . . Thousands of words were written, millions of letters. The times were changing and the words were changing. And the letters, too.
Words are crucial for any relations among people. So is food. Talking and eating. A feast. Yet a feast needs crockery. That's why we've combined calligraphy with ceramics, with porcelain plates. Although words can build bridges between people, they can also build walls and precipices. When we don't understand the meaning of words, we feel upset, frustrated and isolated. So we have deprived words of meaning and dispersed them into single letters, thus transformed them into sheer ornaments. Then they began to speak their own language, the universal language of abstract visual art.
In Polish language words of Turkish origin are not rarities. One of them is DYWAN – a carpet. We know that Turkish divan means also a collection of poems which in former times was also a piece of beautiful calligraphy, a feast for both the spirit and the eyes. What you can see here is our divan – a ceramic carpet – a collection of porcelain plate-poems.
This our interpretation of the East. This is the next stage of the never-ending “journey to the East”.
The FOW team:
Marek Cecula - curator
Ewa Landowska - calligrapher
Barbara Bodziony - calligrapher
Radosław Nowakowski - chronicler
Edyta Cieloch - coordinator
Dagmara Rogers - coordinator
Culture.pl
Ewa Landowska Calligraphy
