Kazimierz Domański, a worker at the railway repair plant in Oława, Poland, had over 200 revelations, driven by his deep faith and missionary zeal. But the Catholic Church never recognized any of these revelations. Our exhibition is devoted to these grey areas of the imagination—religious fervour and visions arising from an excess of metaphysical stimuli or, on the contrary, from a scarcity of such stimuli and a longing for spirituality in a world dominated by the economics of everyday pragmatism. We are interested in the moment of psychedelic transgression, when faith fuels behaviour overstepping the traditional, conventional social or ecclesiastical order. Vernacular visions, apparitions and hallucinations, for the most part driven shamefully to the margins of public life, at best find a home in the tabloid press or cheap quasi-documentary literature. Their allies are grassroots, religious and often amateur forms of artistic expression: woodcuts, glass painting, stained glass. They make up a major part of the exhibition, exposing their anarchic, fantastical, anti-institutional potential through the works of contemporary artists.
