Polish Arts Festival – Homo Faber Myths and Turning Points

6 – 16 September 2025 | The Hunt Museum

Opening & Artist Talks
Saturday, 6 September | 2–5 pm

Centre for Creative Practices
in collaboration with the Polish Arts Festival present
HOMO FABER
Myths and Turning Points
Multidisciplinary installation by
Kleszczewski & Zimnoch, Zimnoch & Kleszczewski
Wrestling with the development trap from primordial
fire to the digital age.

Kasia Zimnoch and Paweł Kleszczewski are a duo of visual artists, curators,
and filmmakers whose practice intertwines contemporary art, animation,
and experimental exhibition-making. Graduates of the Faculty of Fine Arts
at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, they founded Konik Studio in
2013 in Cavan, Ireland, later relocating its activity to Poland after
seven years.
Their work has been presented at over one hundred international film
festivals and art exhibitions receiving awards and critical recognition.
Zimnoch and Kleszczewski’s films and installations often weave together
folklore, myth, and contemporary narratives, creating immersive worlds
where painting, moving image, and performance overlap. As curators, they
experiment with exhibition formats, approaching the gallery space as a
living “kunstkammer” — a cabinet of curiosities where images, objects, and
sounds converse beyond traditional hierarchies.
They have participated in international residencies in Ireland, Sweden,
Estonia, and Germany

We stood face to face with civilization for a long time, believing progress
could change the bad DEAL forced upon us by GOD. One of us – or rather
a PRE-HUMAN – discovered time and death when he threw clay into the
fire. He realized he too could shape matter. From that moment, Homo
Faber fell into a trap: condemned to ceaseless labour, loving blacksmithing,
alchemy, physics, architecture, medicine. The more he strove, the more he
punished himself – paying with his life to conquer time and live forever.
He was St. Augustine, dreaming of HEAVEN on earth.
He was Nimrod, building a CITY that would reach the sky.
The punishment was forgetting the UHRSPRACHE, the primordial link to
God and to one another. From then on: migration, interpretation, exile.
Something like a moss-quilt lies amid a radioactive landscape. Beneath, a
thin stream carries a trace of green light, ending in a rusted barrier. A black
dog finds the fallen man. Nature devours the DECAY left behind by HUMANS and ALIENS.

Is AI the inverted Tower of Babel?
Has Homo Faber finally found a way to
reverse the EVIL SPELL cast by God?
Or is this the end of Homo Faber? LEVEL UP?
Homo Faber filled the world with his creations. The earth is layered with
fragments of his objects – important, unimportant, dear to the heart.
Terracotta armies lie down to sleep forever. Broken swords sink beneath
plastic that now flows in our blood, altering the chains of life.

I saw a plague, and I saw wars on the internet.
I saw the breakthrough of 1989 in western Poland.
I walked to school in Szczecin, the city Stalin gifted to Poland.
I saw Russians selling everything on the marketplace.
I smelled the Amiga 500+ fresh from its box.
I watched my parents play Wings of Fury on glowing joysticks.
I kept a PET bottle, brought by my uncle from another world.
I drank my first Coca-Cola from a can at the border in Kołbaskowo.
I remember the 1990s, and I will never stop loving the objects that flooded
us like a deluge, drowning our complexes in happiness.
I remember the protests when the largest shipyard on the Baltic
was shut down.
“(…) I saw things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the
shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the
Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”
I leave you this kunstkamera,
because what I remember – you have seen,
and what you remember – I have seen.