Subject Catalogue Blackmarket 8th of October 2005, Warsaw

Photogallery Blackmarket Warsaw

Mobile Academy and TR Warszawa proudly present:

Blackmarket for Useful Knowledge and Non-Knowledge:
„On Invisible, Unknown and Ghostly Knowledge“
With 100 Experts from Warsaw.

An Installation by Hannah Hurtzig

The Blackmarket offers Invisible, Unknown and Ghostly Knowledge in the following languages: Dutch, English, French, German, Russian, Spanish and Ukrainian.

(Photos by Basia Welbel)

This installation by Hannah Hurtzig deals with the representation and communication of knowledge and information and was successfully shown with different topics in various theatres and museums before. The Installation imitates wellknown places of knowledge transfer such as the archive and the reading room and combines them with situations of communication known from the stockmarket and counseling talks. The installation was brought to life by 100 experts from Warsaw.

Jerzy Siwiec and Grzegorz Jarzyna (Photo by Marta Orlik)

client and Joanna Tokarska - Bakir (Photo by Marta Orlik)

Topic of the Warsaw Blackmarket is the invisible, unknown and ghostly knowledge. On this evening a hundred storytellers will initiate a ghost library, carried live, a living lexicon of the ghostly. Ghosts are essences or ideas, not living, not dead, not yet born or incapable of dying, neither present nor absent--they have the ability to put reality into the balance and to rob it, at least for the moment of their appearance, of its matter and provability. Ghosts do actually disappear in the light, but only to return in another place. In this way, the Enlightenment did indeed replace belief systems with systems of knowledge, but only by creating its own ghosts.

Robert Kusmirowski (Photo by Basia Welbel)

Rehearsal, Oskar Dawicki and Agnieszka Sural (Photo by Marta Orlik)

All of the invisible ones - spirits, the undead, phantoms, vampires and ghosts - can only be understood in the social context that produced them, usually one of exclusion, suppression, expulsion. So "the phantom of the market economy has replaced the ghost of communism" (Heiner Müller), and the most modern form of the ghostly today would be the refugee, the illegal migrant, who is indeed present, but is deprived of civil rights, who falls outside of public perception and its models of representation.

Bruno Jasienski and client (Photo by Marta Orlik)

Invisible knowledge refers to economic, political, and social structures that cannot be recognized because we are blind to them; it means ideas and things that cannot be spoken, whether due to censorship or banning, or because they have not yet become linguistically comprehensible; it is the suppressed, forgotten contents of the past or the fantastic and also possible visions of the future.

Clientes and Dorota Maslowska (Photo by Marta Orlik)

In the Blackmarket you may book an individual meeting with one or more experts and talk with them for half an hour. You can choose among 100 mainly Polish experts from various fields like: natural and political sciences, anthropology, literature & poetry, philosophy, psycho-an-alysis, folklore, journalism, theatre, economy, film, visual arts, activism, ethnology, cosmetics/beauty, polit-ics, spirituality, health care, therapy and music. From A=Pawel Althamer till Z=Andrzej -Zimniak they offer a wide spectrum of invisible, unknown & ghostly knowledge in their professions from A=Absence to Z=Zombie. You will sit and talk with your expert at one of 100 tables for half an hour and you will be offered individual consultations and narrations on the subject. If you are not interested in checking in as a client for a private dialogue with an expert, you may also come as a visitor and listen to the conversations via headphones. > Subject Catalogue

Carolin Hochleichter, Hannah Hurtzig
client, Jan Jacub Michalek (Photo by Marta Orlik)