The exhibition title is borrowed from football fans slogans, which help to sweeten the bitterness of a defeat. The title can also relate to unworked guilt turned into a taboo and repressed. The exhibition consists of installations that correspond to each other and embody the issue of emotions in a public space and making sense of a defeat. Grzegorz Hańderek makes a metaphor out of a current imagology of well known emotional messages, that aim to build up a tribal community and its mobilization.

The first installation arranges itself into thick layer of wax that imitates a mosaic/carpet on the floor. The material relates to the used, melted candles, the light that has unifying function in the tribal structures, manifestations etc. Wax refers also to the imagery that connects to death and strategies that allow to make peace with the lack (grief, mourning, trauma, melancholy). The second installation consists of the layer of the drenched earth/sward that is analogous in the shape and thickness to the first one, and is covered with the lime pitch lines. It relates directly to the sport event („a victorious defeat” of Poland in so called „match on the water” during the World Football Championship in 1974), but the earth also symbolises the mother in the nationalistic symbolic order. Sacrificial insemination of the earth with blood symbolically revives the ethnic group. In both installations material, its physical properties, and symbolism is of crucial importance. The matter we walk on, the matter as the place where the community constellates. Consistency and viscosity depend on the temperature: wax that do not dissolve in water is contrasted with the drenched earth.

Stanisław Ruksza the exhibition curator

Grzegorz Hańderek (1977) works with visual art and artistic graphics. He has been working in the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice since 2003. In 2005 he received his PhD degree, in 2010 he completed his habilitation process. Currently he works as an associate professor at The Academy of Fine Arts where he runs The Interpretation of Literature Studio. In 2008-2012 he was the dean of the faculty of arts of the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice and since 2012 he has been the vice-rector for student affairs. He received twice the scholarship of the the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. He has been an author of several dozen exhibitions. He has participated in over two hundred of group exhibitions in Poland and abroad. He is a winner of many awards and the curator of 9th Triennial of Polish Graphics.

Collaboration:
Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice