Pan Tadeusz Museum, Wroclaw Poland
The Pan Tadeusz Museum in Wroclaw is a place where history and modernity come together. Based on the best traditions of Polish Romanticism, it continues to promote the most vivid and active aspects of Polish culture, seeking a language which makes it possible to present the cultural legacy of this great work of literary art in a contemporary context, allowing room for reinterpretation
The phenomenon of illegibility and the accumulation of layers of script is the subject of the new temporary exhibition at the Pan Tadeusz Museum. The exhibition includes works e.g. by Andrzej Bednarczyk, Irma Blank, Zbigniew Libera and Andrzej Szewczyk.
Most of us have experienced writing down a note which is later illegible, even to ourselves; it has occurred to almost everyone that we failed to decipher someone else's scribbling, or have come across a system of signs that we couldn't understand. How do we feel then: irritated, helpless, powerless? Or perhaps, in those conditions, when the desire for meaning evades us so blatantly, do we discover perception of different kind, where the script becomes a material phenomenon in itself, a fascinating ornament, a code without information? We see scripts which are visible, but not legible.
The notion of a palimpsest appears to be closely related to illegibility. This term describes a manuscript written on previously used material. A palimpsest involves layers of overwritten script, in which the old layers eventually begin to reappear from below the new, making the writing less legible, if at all.