Equinox

 The Equinox (Equine)project emerges from the problem of the relationship between language, as an act of using a system of signs, and the image, understood as an autonomous form of producing meaning. Here, the image does not function solely as representation, but above all as an active generator of meaning, operating through visibility, visual relations, and affect. The key issue of the exhibition is to investigate the possibility of visual reasoning based on linguistic ambiguity, using the act of disambiguation, the resolution of polysemy (rodeo) through a constructed context (arena). The aim of disambiguation is to domesticate the concept and correct its dynamic tension.

The works produced as part of the project consist primarily of objects, works on paper, and video pieces of varying lengths, exploring the space stretched between equine and equinox, terms that differ etymologically and semantically, yet are phonetically close.
Equine (from Latin equus, horse) and equinox (from aequus, equal, and nox, night) are linked by the motif of symmetry, the balance of opposites, and duality (actor and re-actor). In the concept of Equinox, disambiguation is understood as a visual and artistic practice in which the formal clarity of a work is achieved through the analysis of the ambiguous nature of linguistic phenomena. An important context here is the hermetic concept of correspondence (“as above, so below”), which assumes an analogy between different levels of reality, linguistic and visual. This principle also binds together seemingly incompatible and distant cultural contexts, such as Upper Silesia and Texas, but viewed from the perspective of mining horses and ranch horses, united by the phenomenon of the equinox.

Rodeo is often described as a spectacle of strength, courage, and human domination over the animal. At the center of this spectacle, however, lies not brutal control but balance, fragile, momentary, and constantly threatened. Taming a horse in rodeo does not involve complete subjugation, but rather maintaining a state of dynamic tension between the animal’s movement and the rider’s body. It is precisely this balance, poised on the edge of a fall, which constitutes the essence of the experience.

In the act of rodeo, the horse does not strive for harmony, it destabilizes it. Its violent movements force the rider to react rather than initiate. The rider’s body responds through asymmetrical tensions, leans, and micro-movements, operating with minimal means of control. Balance is not created through axial alignment, but through permanent tilt. Riding, therefore, is not about stabilization, but about consenting to instability. The fall is inevitable, and the rider’s task is not to deny this truth, but to position body and attention in such a way that the moment of falling is delayed.

This desired state of balance also has a temporal dimension. Eight seconds mark the boundary of the experience, in which the goal is not victory but survival. Balance becomes the art of postponing the fall, a temporary suspension of catastrophe, after which the carefully constructed relationship inevitably collapses.

The rider’s body does not initiate the event, it reacts, operating in a mode of delay, correction, and compensation. Balance thus becomes a practice of being-moved rather than exercising control.



In Choreographing Empathy, Susan Leigh Foster redefines empathy less as a spontaneous emotional reaction of the viewer and more as the effect of consciously designed choreographic strategies. Empathy arises through the kinesthetic engagement of the spectator’s body, modulated by tempo, rhythm, relationships between bodies, and the framing of performance. From this perspective, riding in rodeo, although functioning outside the field of dance, can be read as an intense, extreme form of choreography.

This perspective makes it possible to grasp the cultural dimension of this embodied knowledge. Choreography, as a system for organizing the body, is based on the principle that movement, far from being neutral, is always embedded in a specific regime of discipline, norms, and imaginaries. In rodeo, the rider’s body performs a specific “choreography of risk”: asymmetrical, unstable, based on figures such as twisting, leaning, or overloading one side of the body. One hand holds the rope, the other remains free, and this gesture not only intensifies the spectacle, but also reveals the structural fragility
of control.

Rodeo thus exposes the paradox of taming: it is not a negation of chaos, but a practice of enduring within it. The most important goal is therefore not victory or defeat, but a brief moment in which order and uncertainty remain inseparable, a moment of being “in between” control and its loss.

Balance is also a central performative category. Rodeo, often interpreted as a spectacle of domination and violence, is revealed here as a practice of dynamic, temporary balance between the animal’s body (the actor) and the human (the re-actor). Taming the horse does not consist in lasting control, but in keeping the rider’s body in a state of constant correction in relation to unpredictable movement and latency. Balance is not a goal, but a process of time, risk, and embodied negotiation.

From the perspective of performance studies, rodeo functions as a liminal action in which meaning is produced through real danger and intense bodily presence. These eight seconds of riding constitute
a temporal frame that intensifies the experience, in which, following the thought of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, culture produces not so much meaning as presence.

Rodeo thus becomes a kind of laboratory of balance, a state in which the boundary between control and its absence is revealed, where the key moment is the very duration itself: tense, temporary, and threatened with collapse.

Visually, the exhibition is partly based on images that shape the myth of the American frontier, the iconography of the Wild West, which, contemporarily refreshed and demythologized, casts new light on the dynamics, the economy of instability and the permanent negotiation of balance.



“Organized as part of a scholarship from the Minister of Culture and National Heritage, funded by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.”