practice of seeing

A participatory project involving people with visual impairments enters into a dialogue with Władysław Strzemiński’s canonical work in the history of art, “Theory of Vision,” the 70th anniversary of whose death falls this year.

 

In his book, Strzemiński approaches art history as the development of visual awareness characteristic of societies across successive epochs. He builds his narrative about what is most essential in art around sight, perception, and the interpretation of what is seen, while also analyzing the very functioning of the sense of vision. The subject held personal significance for him, as the artist himself struggled with the impairment of one eye and a serious visual defect in the other.

Strzemiński’s work serves as a point of departure for the creators to develop a theatrical performance in which one of its key layers—visuality—may be questioned due to the participation of people with visual impairments.

​

In both visual arts and theatre, sight is the primary sense through which audiences receive experience. Exploring other possibilities, other perspectives, and exchanging experiences through the meeting of two different ways of seeing—one that sees and one that sees differently—may lead the creators to construct a narrative that Strzemiński himself might not have fully anticipated. There will not be a single theory of vision, but multiple ones, depending on who is speaking, what they see, or what they wish to see.

​

If Strzemiński argued that every эпоха perceives the world differently, and that this perspective is constantly shifting, how should we—people of the 21st century—look at the world? A world that is incredibly complex, heterogeneous, multilayered, and increasingly surprising and unsettling. A world flooded with an unimaginable number of images surrounding us from all sides. What kind of sensitivity in seeing do we need today? How can we look at another person in an empathetic and non-harmful way? What can we learn about the contemporary world by seeing it through the eyes of people with visual impairments? What do we, as sighted individuals, fail to notice—what escapes us? Finally, how can we create visual art and theatre today in ways that are not exclusionary?