Jan Baracz: twilight mechanics. Peninsula - January 23, 6–9 PM

A unique program will be held on Thursday, February 20, featuring an artist performance and an art talk. In addition, private tours will be scheduled with Jan Baracz, Izabela Gola, visual arts curator at the Polish Cultural Institute New York, and Peninsula’s director, Eric Fallen.

Exhibition Dates: January 23 – March 7, 2025
Opening Reception: January 23, 6–9 PM
Public Program: February 20
Peninsula
13 Monroe Street, New York, NY 10002

twilight mechanics, the second solo show of Jan Baracz at Peninsula, is a window onto the unfathomable—a visceral dissection of the state of unconscious on the landfill of the Anthropocene.

Walk into space to witness familiar narratives collapse in the face of techno-economic “progress.” In the new body of work, Baracz examines the atrophy of social bonds, dissolution of reason, and erosion of shared values and norms, further amplified by technological foray into the fragile fabric of human relations.

Using materials sourced from the fringes of industrial production, Baracz crafts works that redirect the gaze inward into what is unseen, the darker regions of the human psyche. His probing, associative poetic re-reframes modes of human perception and manifests how our reality, impacted and reshaped by the colossal disfiguration of the ongoing humanitarian and environmental crises, is misconstrued.

Jan Baracz is a Polish-born artist living in New York since 1981. He’s known for his installation works, sculptures, and photography. Baracz has shown internationally at the Contemporary Art Center, Warsaw, Poland, Art Unlimited, Basel, Switzerland and artMbassy Gallery, in Berlin, Germany. Baracz's video Eyebeads by Words Held Fast premiered in New York in 2006. In 2008, he produced the cinematic installation LIVE VIDEO at Art in General in NYC, and in 2012, he exhibited his sculptural project How to Float Above the Psychic Stampede at the Stoyanov Gallery in NYC. Baracz's installation On the Nature of Dust Deposits, Minerva Owl Flight Patterns, and Other Commonly Overlooked Events was viewed at Hudson Valley MOCA in Peekskill, NY, from 2017 to 2019. In 2022, Konnotation Press published his photography book, Eyebeads by Words Held Fast. His last solo exhibition, Mutiny’s Darling (2023) at Peninsula Gallery in NYC, was reviewed in the Brooklyn Rail. He has received grants and awards from Art Matters, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, and the Kosciuszko Foundation. Baracz's photography has appeared in Paris Review, American Letters & Commentary, and numerous other magazines.

***
twilight mechanics is curated by Izabela Gola, visual arts curator at the Polish Cultural Institute New York, and is made possible thanks to the support of the Polish Cultural Institute New York