Dreaming is a development of the work Klaman presented at the exhibition accompanying Manifesta 2012 in Genk. It is a video installation consisting of metal working cabinets (called spindles in Silesian) containing monitors displaying interviews with miners who once worked in the mines, witnesses and participants in past history. Klaman's projects bring to the surface muted voices, echoes, impressions, whispers, fragments of memories and accounts, and inscribe them in the current situation and space. At the exhibition in Kronika, the cabinets will come to life, receiving a post-industrial mobile form, supported by pistons.

Solidarity Guerilla is a prototype of a guerrilla car, consisting of a factory van and a dummy weapon (the project is a prototype), used for the possible defence of one's own interests, e.g. protection of a demonstration, a strike or tenants from eviction. The project will be accompanied by photo sessions with potential users, e.g. trade union representatives, squtters, activists or other communities for whom such a vehicle could be useful. Documentation from the photo sessions will go into an exhibition at the Chronicle. The title Black Dawn can be read in the context of Solidarity Guerilla as a quasi-anarchist name/prediction of the coming rebellions.

Both works will be shown at the exhibition together with Grzegorz Klaman's earlier works from another post-industrial place strongly marked by history - the Gdańsk Shipyard, where the Wyspa Institute of Art, founded by the artist, is located (among others, documentation of the famous Black Dawn). He has also worked with the film series Blow up, shot in the abandoned spaces of a university campus in Florida.

Grzegorz Klaman (born 1959) - one of the most influential visual artists of his generation in Poland, sculptor, performer, educator, curator, cultural animator and activist. Leader of the independent Gdańsk art movement. Since 1985 he has worked as an educator at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, where he runs the Intermedia Studio, currently as a full professor. Founder and leader of Wyspa Gallery, co-author of the Open Atelier concept. He ran the former City Baths (1994-1998) and Łaźnia Centre for Contemporary Art. Co-founder of the Wyspa Institute of Art in the former Gdańsk shipyard. In 2007, he was a Fulbright scholar at Florida Atlantic University, where his solo exhibition was held at the Schmidt Art Center, and in 2010 he realised a project at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm. His work is included in prestigious art collections nationally and internationally. 

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The project was created as part of the Project Metropolis programme organised jointly by the Imago Mundi Foundation, the Kronika CCA in Bytom and the Silesian Museum in Katowice.
Partners of Grzegorz Klaman's project Black Dawn: Guido Mine in Zabrze, City of Sosnowiec

About PROJECT METROPOLIS:

The program Project Metropolis undertakes to create a contemporary portrait of Upper Silesia and Zagłębie. It opens up a discussion between visual and sound artists, treating art as a cognitive tool rather than a wishful, wishful image.

The aim of the project is to discover parallel, existing next to each other: cities in a city, regions in a region. For do we really know our region, metropolis, cities, districts. Is it one image or rather many? A series of overlapping, interpenetrating images: wishful, but also unwanted, based on tradition, but also clearly cutting itself off from it. Metropolis takes into account many perspectives: social, economic, historical, cultural, political?

The activities of the Project Metropolis programme include: artistic residencies throughout Upper Silesia and the Zagłębie Dąbrowskie region and actions based on the activity of the region's inhabitants. The summary of the project (conferences, exhibitions, publications) will be held in 2014 with a large exhibition in the new building of the Silesian Museum in Katowice.

The project is organised by the Imago Mundi Foundation. Substantive partner of the project is the CCA Kronika in Bytom.

- Stanisław Ruksza, curator of the Project Metropolis.