The main prize in the competition „Under pressure. How to be yourself in the contemporary oppressive world?”: Aleksander Piątek, Monika Braksal (Poland) / Pressure / - Me – on. Me – off. It’s up to you.

Aleksander Piątek, Monika Braksal (Poland) / Pressure / Warsaw

Aleksander Piątek and Monika Braksal (Poland)

Martin Roskom (USA) / Perfection / fiction - Perfection, a beautiful dream, or grand illusion when we strive to disguise the problems we see.

Lex Drewinski (Germany / Poland) - I think that people with a different skin colour, particularly those with black skin colour, are under the greatest pressure from white folk. This pressure has been continuously applied since time immemorial and unfortunately there is no reason to believe that it will stop, especially in light of recent cases of black US citizens killed by police officers.

Chong Veng (Eddie) Cheang (China) / I

Chong Veng (Eddie) Cheang and Candy (China)

Wenjie Huo (China) / Nervous / - With our busy schedules and our hectic pace of life, we live in a stressful world. But don’t lose yourself, everything will be resolved eventually. Take it easy.

Agnieszka Popek-Banach, Kamil Banach (Poland) - This work is trying to touch the problem of pressure we impose on ourselves, and to what extent such a burden can be bearable. It focuses on the question regarding facing oneself, one’s expectations, ambitions, one’s own “self”

Zuzanna Banasińska (Poland) / Like / Live - In these social media days, the Facebook thumbs-up icon has become a value in itself. We watch, giving ‘Likes’ on photos or posts which would have been closed in an album or diary in the past. To what extent is our life authentic while we constantly compare ourselves to others, putting on virtual masks to impress them and get the largest virtual response possible? In being under this ubiquitous pressure, forcing us into self-creation and peering at others, don’t we forget about ourselves and our real life?

Zuzanna Banasińska (Poland)

Mario Fuentes (Ecuador) / Who Am I? / - Crisis of global identity due to the virtualization of the individual and the reality.

Celeste Fichter (USA) - I am a visual artist interested in word play, punning and the conceptual slippages between. My work explores the distance between meaning and representation, the flexibility and dynamics of language and the conversation between the concrete and the symbolic.

Aleksander Piątek and Monika Braksal (Poland) - Pressure – who creates it? Us, or maybe them, those others? Where is the source of this perpetuum mobile, the machine which is not driven by anybody, yet nobody can stop it.

Joanna Ejzler (Poland) / Breathe / - In response to oppression, I considered awareness of the breath – the awareness of existence, most important. The work aims at reminding the viewer of the significance of the breath. This message has been presented by means of symbols from multimedia players, while the message is a simple instruction of how to come back to oneself.

Joanna Ejzler (Poland)