Taking air into one’s mouth can happen in dif­ferent situations: to inflate a bal­loon, or to stop oneself from saying too much, but also when per­for­ming mouth-to-mouth rescucitation. All of these cases appear in Oskar Dawicki’s latest exhibition. Its primary material is air—its absence, and even its excess. Dawicki’s newest works inevitably revolve around the questions of genius and vanity as two sides of the same coin: the artist’s fate. If genius guaran­tees immor­tality, vanity can be deadly for art.

Dawicki’s per­for­mative back­ground leads him to approach these sen­sitive issues through the lens of experimen­tal physics. How can one breathe eter­nal life into an artist’s fading body? By for­cing air into the mouth, or by war­ming the hands?

Dawicki attempts both. He measures the weight of fame and the many faces of artistic poverty. He displays a brass cast of Chopin’s Left Hand, and in the secret Poet’s Room he pays a writer an absur­dly high fee for a poem writ­ten just for him. In The Poetry of Selec­tion he paints the tragedy of artistic hierar­chies that arise not from love of art, but from relen­tless arith­metic. Poetry— a field that brings great sym­bolic prestige but little money—serves here as a metaphor for the art Dawicki would like to save. To save art, or at least to save artists—and above all one artist, the one within his own body.

The exhibition Mouth to Mouth is also a col­lec­tion of spec­tacular props that introduce a fresh dose of sin­cere despair into Dawicki’s life performance.