The PAIN GAME does not propose fixed rules; the artist's own experience becomes only a starting point for others to share their own perspective on individual experiences of pain or perspectives related to the conditions of its functioning in social space. Each person participating in the game overwrites its successive layers with a sharp tool on the smooth surface of the table. In the PAIN GAME, individual perspective and the experience of pain, as well as the social dimensions of its presence, including (in)visibility, matter. Each overwritten story, concerning personal experiences or the social perspective of the functioning of pain, will be recorded through frottage performed each time on the surface of the table.
Implemented as part of the Logic of Cruelty series, which is a part of the Aesthetic Congress - unfolded in the time (and space) of a research program dedicated to the politics of surfaces, the politics of design, and the political dimensions of visibility. In the KUNS(Z)T gallery, we initiate a challenge of mapping the contexts and principles on which we function in relation to each other, the invisible policies of (co)presence.
Curator of the Aesthetic Congress - Łukasz Trzciński

1st edition PAINGAME
Location: Goethe Institute, Cracow
19.12.2023, 18:00 – opening durational action;
20.12.2023 – BREASTMILK trio appearance;
31.12.2023, 12:00 – noise concert, Dawid Kowalik and Mariia Mytrofanova.