The Long Night of Museums 2018: GAME ROOM

For the 2018 edition of the Long Night of Museums, Muzeum Sztuki prepared a special exhibition, the form of which resembled a game room. If you had decided to look for "do not touch" tablets, it would have been in vain. The exhibited works- some shown for the first time- were exhibited not only to be watched and admired, but above all to be used, touched and played with.

What might have been a real treat was the exhibited for the first time in Łódź since the 2003 Venice Biennale, the work of Stanisław Dróżdż called Alea iacta est. During the Long Night of Museums, we saw and played with its book edition. It was neither pool nor dice – you had to come and see for yourself what Dróżdż came up with in his work, whose title was: The Die Has Been Cast. The visitors of the Muzeum Sztuki played against the artist!

Another work to play with was Dora Maurer’s Dam, which was created during the first edition of Construction in Process, in Łódź in 1981. Maurer's installation resembled checkers, but instead of using plastic pieces, the artist used stones in it. Another piece of art reminiscent of a board game was the work by Ryszard Winiarski, similar to the old Chinese game of go. The participants of the Long Night of Museums had the opportunity to play it following the rules created by the artist.

The fourth, in turn, was a photography game inspired by the concept of mechanical photography by Józef Robakowski. The audience was provided with specially protected cameras that could be thrown, and then taken photographs from the place where they stopped. After four "throws" the photos were printed and collated. One copy of the work created in this way was taken home by the visitors and the other stayed at the Muzeum Sztuki.

The fifth part appealed to the lovers of word games. The game was based on the work of Antoni Starczewski entitled A Table with Colorful Potatoes. Small, colorful, ceramic potatoes were laid on the table. Between them, the artist left empty spaces. The players tried to find among them the longest possible meaningful arrangements of letters or syllables.

The last, the sixth part of the exhibition was the work of Wacław Szpakowski. What is characteristic for the artist's creativity are drawings of lines that take different, geometric shapes, but they never intersect. The game inspired by Szpakowski's work was a kind of repetition of maths lessons.