"The notion of discipline generates a fantasy of an ideal order based on established rules of the game, clearly articulated forms of punishment and artificially constructed conditions of equal opportunities. The game results in a closed narrative, where all challenges end up as win-lose events, are quantifiable and incontestable.
While working on the exhibition project, I focused on things which aroused a sense of doubt or excitement in me, to the point where I didn’t know whether what I observed was a good thing or wasn’t. I was interested in all circumstances and consequences of adhering to laws regulating human behaviours, setting goals and their limits. Using the examples of a school, a detention centre and sporting spectacles, I wanted to recreate an atmosphere suffused with tensions, limitations, cumulating all the laws, rules and reactions characteristic of areas of total institutions.
The exhibition is also my personal reflection on the world or art, in which rivalry does not always follow clear-cut categories, and where success and failure are equivocal, while the fans don’t always fill the empty seats in the stands."
Dominik Ritszel
Dominik Ritszel (b. 1988) is a visual artist, working in film and video installation. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice Chair of Graphic Art (2013). Recipient of the “Young Poland” scholarship (2014) and the Young European Artist Trieste Contemporanea Award 2015. Currently, a DFA candidate at the AFA in Katowice. Based in Katowice.