Exhibition 'Postcards Dropped on the Way Home' in Myymälä2

Postcards Dropped on the Way Home

By Tomasz Szrama

01. - 24.08.2025

Opening/Avajaiset 31.07.2025 18:00 – 20:00

When I talk about my home, my relatives ask me which one do I mean? Is it the one in Poland, where I was born, or the one in Helsinki, where I have lived and worked for almost 3 decades?

The situation is complicated by the fact that in connection with my main field of work I travel a lot. I have presented my actions on every continent except Antarctica. I have performed in a city as far north as Nuuk in Greenland, as far south as Punta Arenas in Patagonia or as far from Helsinki as Dunedin in New Zealand. During every trip, a particular place of accommodation becomes my home for a brief moment. I enjoy my nomadic ways of creating art, yet so many of these actions are only ever viewed by a very limited number of people at the moment and the photographs only ever portray a limited understanding of the work.

This exhibition combines pictures from my numerous performances around the world, alongside the fresh analog records and objects used for the actions in the gallery.

I predominantly work with action art. Engaging the audience without prior consent, I create dynamically 'choreographed' situations to share a common experience, to bring forth the essence of the situation in any given context or moment. These sequences of images are ephemeral in every respect. Few traces of them remain - photographic documentation has been the key way my work has been archived over the past years. Usually, when I return from a festival, I choose just one picture from the performance I have just performed and post it on social media along with a public 'thank you' to the organizers. Since it is impossible to capture the plot or the dramaturgy of an action stretched over time in a single picture, I try to choose a technically correct photo that is, above all, intriguing, question-provoking and in which the context of the place is captured. In this sense, these posts play a role similar to that of postal cards, from which, after all, we also learn so little about a given context. I intend to show a large selection of such photographic documentation in the form of standard postcards.

The picture postcard is an ephemeral form of communication that seems to me a mobile artefact similar to performance art.

In the course of my actions I am unlikely to have the head or time to think about its documentation. During this exhibition, I will expand beyond my usual performance practice to not just consider the ephemeral audience but to create performance works with the direct purpose of developing new photographic works, reflecting on the complex nature of the relationship between live performance and photography. This will happen by collaborating with Antti Ahonen who will take analogue images of the performances which will happen during the exhibition.

In 2022 I had a previous exhibition at the Entropia gallery in Wroclaw, Poland called 'Postcard sent on the Move'. This time I would like to present a slightly different, larger selection of documentation and a completely different live performance set in Helsinki - my second home.

Thanks to the Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike) for supporting the exhibition.