“BARKIN / 感 度” is already the second exhibition of Czułość in Tokyo. Czułość (jap.感 度)  began its activity in the Polish underground in 2010, with time becoming an independent culture-forming international platform. The activities of the group, which today include artists from China, Japan, Germany, Poland, and Ukraine, are characterized by independence from the academic and institutional cultural system. They focus their activities on the bottom-up cultural organization, create an international network of contacts, function as NGO, and as a gallery operating on the art market. The exhibition will show you the latest works by eight artists cooperating with the group.

In  W+K+ Gallery in Tokyo, artists from Czułość will make a visual analysis of the interface between photography and graphite, two fields of art and two of the most popular creative communication media in the world today. “Slightly simplifying, I understand graffiti as a form of marking one’s presence in a common space, it is a grassroots manifestation of pluralism and a kind of anarchist opposition to the bourgeois hierarchy. Graffiti is like barking dogs at night, which in this way inform about their presence. Our exhibition could be just such a sign of our presence, as a group, simple information that we exist. Informing about your existence is not that trivial and symbolizes self-awareness and the basic form of self-determination and openness to communicate with others. That is why I am tempted not to strain ourselves on any other meanings of our exhibition, and even strive for the idea of an elusive interpretation, a transparent art functioning only as barking and as its independent sound. The photography can be like that if you get rid of the symbolism and the author’s thought interpretation and use the greatest value of this tool – a robotic programmation to faithfully record reality. And such can be the graffiti, which, in addition to marking the area, still has some kind of tribute in itself or it is a medium to some independently existing values.” – Janek Zamoyski, founder of Czułość.

Artists:
Nampei Akaki (Japan)
Sławomir “Zbiok” Czajkowski (Poland)
Stanisław Legus (Poland)
Bao Ting (China)
Stach Szumski (Poland)
Johann Winkelmann (Germany)
Vova Vorotniov (Ukraine)
Janek Zamoyski (Poland)

The SIDE CORE project was founded and initiated by Sakie Takasu and Tori Matsushita in 2012. They have held multiple exhibitions with “the extension of the self within the city” as their main concept. In recent years, they have conducted their “MIDNIGHT WALK Tour” held on an irregular basis. SIDE CORE scatters their guerrilla-tic works in collaboration with other artists in the city, wandering around existing architecture and murals, graffiti, and the city. They also run a studio and multi-purpose space. These activities are a practice to unfold the rules laid on public space, intervene with it, and create new action.

Funded by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of Poland under the Multiannual Program INDEPENDENT 2017-2022, as part of the grant program of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute “Cultural Bridges”