Opening 25.04, 19;00
Artist: Bogusław Bachorczyk
Curator: Arkadiusz Półtorak
The event is organised as part of Cracow Art Week KRAKERS 2025
Forest, fallen trees, family keepsakes, memories of bonfires lit in the mountain pastures (bonfires ignited with flair, to impress the boys from the neighboring hill and also—at least from the perspective of some—to win the favor of the local girls)… A tour of Bogusław Bachorczyk’s exhibition could begin with such a list. But there are other ways. An equally fitting introduction might be a list of artists whose work enters into dialogue with the pieces gathered in the gallery: Brâncuși, Hasior, Spoerri, Haring… The exhibition is deliberately suspended between the aesthetics of the neo-avant-garde and those closer to folk art, even rural craftsmanship. Yet Bachorczyk’s works refuse to settle fully into any of these orders, evoking a sense of estrangement within each context. This suspended state is metaphorically signaled by the exhibition’s foreign-language title—“Vlach,” the Czech, Slovak, or Serbo-Croatian equivalent of the Polish Wołoch. In contemporary Slavic languages, the word refers to a traveler from the pastoral peoples who once lived exclusively in the southern Carpathians and began colonizing the northern range in the 14th century. Crucially, in the context of the exhibition, the word “Vlach” once simply meant stranger.
The exhibition documents Bachorczyk’s journey back to his roots, namely the Stryszawa region in the Żywiec-Orawa Beskids, where traces of Vlach settlement date as far back as the 15th century. In his works, the artist references the Vlach heritage in various ways—including traditional woodwork techniques and spatial arrangements inspired by patterns of Vlach settlement, still visible today in the Beskid landscape. However, the exhibition title should be read primarily as a metaphor—a figure of the artist’s personal experience as someone returning to a once-familiar land as both insider and outsider, half-foreign. After finishing primary school and moving away from Stryszawa, Bachorczyk gradually distanced himself from aspects of rural identity that conflicted with his identity as a gay man, and later as a student and teacher at art schools—such as the cult of physical labor and devotion to the Catholic Church. Over time, however, not only did the artist’s identity shift, but Stryszawa itself changed. The most striking evidence of the cultural and social transformation of this mountain village are the rescued pieces of furniture—whole and fragmented—which became the material for the works shown at Shefter Gallery. These objects fell out of use during a period of rapid modernization.
The works gathered in the exhibition document the artist’s attempts to process his own entanglements and his creative confrontation with the instability of contemporary rural culture—a culture increasingly removed from the clichés invoked today in the so-called folk turn in Polish art and humanities. Most of the sculptures were created by the artist in collaboration with his father. Their relationship is also reflected in two assemblages that juxtapose symbols of the “open” and “fluid” culture of the postmodern metropolis with household items from Stryszawa—or more precisely, from the Stryszawa that Bachorczyk remembers from his youth. If these works express a clear tension between symbols of the rural and the urban—echoing the artist’s own migratory experience—then in the context of the entire exhibition, the contrast between folk quotes and presumed urban elements does not serve as the primary interpretive key. Rather, the exhibition space becomes a threshold zone, much like the contemporary rural landscape in Poland—or at least in many villages of southern Poland, which are increasingly taking on suburban characteristics. The ongoing spatial and cultural shifts in these areas are referenced, for instance, in Bachorczyk’s paintings, which bear impressions of tools from both historical and modern gardens and workshops in Stryszawa. The visuality of this rural transformation also informs the exhibition’s scenography, which incorporates found materials as pedestals—like old concrete tiles (a common feature of suburban and rural gardens in today’s Poland) or smoked glass, widely used in domestic interiors in the 1980s and 1990s. Just as the Vlachs once colonized the Beskids, today’s Beskid hills bear witness to complex processes of cultural mobility, driven as much by migration as by economic and political change.
