PERCEPTIONS. New Forms of Art returns for its third edition
PERCEPTIONS. New Forms of Art returns for its third edition. The very name of the event is deliberately incorrect. In Polish, the word percepcja (“perception”) is rarely used in the plural, as if language itself assumed that there were only one way of perceiving reality. PERCEPTIONS starts from the opposite premise: there are many ways of seeing, feeling and interpreting the world, even within a single person. They shift with experience, emotion, knowledge and the point from which we look. Theatre and the performing arts offer a particularly fertile testing ground for this idea: they allow us, even if only for a moment, to adopt someone else’s perspective, change our own position and question what previously seemed self-evident. We are therefore interested in works that do not merely show us the world, but propose different ways of experiencing it.
The programme of the third edition forms a narrative around communication and the body. We are interested in situations in which humans attempt to communicate with other people, intelligent systems and non-human entities, while the body becomes a tool, an image, a commodity, an object of control or a partner to a machine.
We open the third edition of PERCEPTIONS with the premiere of Krzysztof Garbaczewski’s “LUMO: Tower of Babel”, a production of The CROSSROADS Centre. Its starting point is Esperanto, a language created as an attempt to overcome divisions and restore the possibility of communication across national and cultural boundaries. In this sense, it recalls the biblical myth of the Tower of Babel and the memory of a time when humanity was said to share a single language, with common speech serving as a source of unity and strength. Yet the performance does not treat a universal language as a utopia that can simply be recovered. Today we communicate through platforms, networks and automated translation systems, but more connections do not necessarily mean greater understanding. In “LUMO”, theatre becomes a distributed structure, linking artists from several countries through the Digital Perform Network. What interests me most in this project is the fragility of communication: every connection can be broken, every utterance passes through a device and through code, and yet it is precisely this uncertainty that generates the need to meet.
The power of questions and answers, and of the meanings and images that emerge from them, lies at the heart of Victorine van Alphen’s “The Oracle: Ritual for the Future (for humans and non-humans)”. An oracle is a source of prophecy, but the term is also used in computing to describe a system that provides information. Today, the convergence of mystical knowledge about an unknowable future with a binary message generated by a system takes on particular significance. Increasingly, we direct our questions to artificial intelligence. Is it beginning to assume the role of a contemporary oracle for us, influencing our decisions and worldview, but also the way we perceive ourselves? Van Alphen also asks what AI-generated answers are made of. We train these systems on data produced by our culture, passing on our stereotypes, prejudices and assumptions about what we consider normal, attractive or desirable. A feedback loop emerges: we shape the system, and it reinforces the most deeply rooted patterns, often those based on simplification and stigmatising clichés. In van Alphen’s immersive ritual, the audience is itself drawn into this mechanism.
The image of the human and non-human body is also at the centre of Silke Grabinger’s “AREYOUARE”. The work refers to feminist performances of the 1970s that criticised the stereotypical confinement of women to the domestic sphere and the definition of their social roles through cooking, caregiving and housework. Grabinger revisits this legacy under contemporary conditions, surrounding herself with kitchen and cleaning robots. The tools and environment have changed, but the question remains: how much have the stereotypes themselves changed? The performer’s relationship with the devices further complicates the distinction between human and mechanical. The robots move, react and adapt their behaviour, while we begin to attribute intentions, emotions and personality to them. The encounter thus becomes a confrontation between two kinds of corporeality.
It is precisely the body — its possibilities, limitations and susceptibility to having its boundaries pushed — that becomes the central subject of Tomasz Bazan’s “Trophy”. After an absence of almost ten years, the artist returns to themes that have been present in his work from the beginning: precision of movement, strength and the physical limits of the performer. Today, however, he approaches them from a different perspective. The body — the dancer’s primary instrument, trained and subjected to the demand for perfection — is put through successive trials. The choreography echoes martial arts and the precision characteristic of Bazan’s earlier work, but it also introduces trembling, animality and genuine exhaustion. “Trophy” does not conceal the physical cost of movement: breathing, a weakening voice and difficulty maintaining balance become part of the performance. In this way, the work raises the question of the price of perfection — the moment when discipline, strength and control begin to work against the body.
The body also returns as a theme in “Ona NIZM”, although here the focus is primarily on the image of the body as it functions online. This is a project by young creators, students only beginning their artistic careers, and it is precisely this perspective that I find particularly interesting. The performance takes place within the space of the internet and is streamed via Twitch — a platform associated above all with game streaming and online culture. The form therefore grows directly out of the subject matter. The performance examines the selling of one’s own image online and the gradual shifting of the boundaries of what we are willing to show others. The internet allows us to construct our own presence, but at the same time subjects it to audience expectations, mechanisms of popularity and the constant need to sustain attention. “Ona NIZM” does not describe this reality from the outside; it uses its language, its platform and its mechanisms of participation.
In the third edition of PERCEPTIONS, the body and communication are constantly intertwined. The body becomes an image, a tool, an object of control, a product or a partner to a machine. Communication may mean an attempt to reach across languages, a question addressed to AI, a response to the movement of a robot, or a form of presence created through live streaming. This year’s programme shows that it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate the way we communicate with the world from the way we perceive our own presence within it. PERCEPTIONS seeks to capture these tensions in order to show how many different ways of seeing and experiencing reality can coexist at the same time.
Barbara Żarinow
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