Kasia Kmita: Contrafactur

Wrocław’s urban fabric is like liquid magma. Its successive fragments have been added to, superstruck and rewritten over the centuries. Some chapters of this spatial story have disappeared completely, others have been brutally erased or seem to have broken off in the middle. However, the story continues, and its successive pages are written by new authors in different languages and in their own handwriting.

Kasia Kmita’s latest project was inspired by an axonometric plan of Wrocław prepared in 1562 by Barthel and Georg Weihner - ‘Contrafactur der Stadt Breslau’. The painting, a gift to Emperor Maximilian II of Habsburg, depicted the city with an extraordinarily coherent form. Although created at the turn of the Renaissance and Baroque, it presented the city in its almost medieval form. It was organised around the Oder islands, girt around the city walls and flanked on all sides by the river and moat channels. Although subsequent centuries changed the shape of the city dramatically, certain elements of the structure depicted in the Weihners’ work are still recognisable today.

The centrepiece of the exhibition is a painting that is a direct response to the famous 16th-century plan, prepared on an identical scale and format (186×187 cm). Kmita’s plan remains faithful to the spirit of the work from five centuries ago, but is not a simple reproduction of it. Instead, it tells the complex story of Wrocław. It juxtaposes buildings that defined the city’s space at different times in its history. Some of the architectural structures were (or are) located at neighbouring addresses, but were erected in different eras and could not meet. The multi-layered nature of the history evoked hee is also symbolically conveyed on a formal level – through the author's technique of paper cutting, in which successive layers are superimposed to tell the story of the city’s centuries-long history.

Curators: Ewa Pluta and Kuba Żary
Organised by: City Museum of Wrocław

Old Town Hall

Rynek 50-107

22.07-3.09.2023

Opening

22.07.2023, 8 p.m.

Walks combined with guided tours of the exhibition

23.07 godz. 17.00 (start: next to Arlekin sculpture near the Capitol Theatre, Piłsudskiego St-Stary Ratusz. The walk ends with the tour of the exhibition)
28.07 godz. 17.00 (Stary Ratusz-Nowe Miasto. The walk starts with the tour of the exhibition)