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BM: Yet even in the absence of defined rules, the game pieces seem to have found a new structural order?

AP: Yes, there is always some kind of order and keeping a semblance of that in this work was intentional.

RK: I think this has something to do with the archetype of the game. When you are playing a game, you are always playing in some way with something. So there is symmetry, at least in the beginning. And in this process the power is constantly shifting, there is a tension: you are a winner and you are a loser at the same time in many points of the game. So maybe we should fundamentally change games? Maybe they shouldn’t be black versus white, because I think the most interesting part is this grey area that is kind of merging the rules.

AP: Chess, for instance, is a very ancient game. It reflects a kind of order in society. It is a strategic game, so it’s about power. As artists, we always think it’s more interesting to think about losing.

RK: This is an interesting concept: the winner will be the loser. So when you’re playing a game you have to do everything to lose. Can you imagine players sitting and trying to lose a game? It would probably be the same level of difficulty as winning a game. You have to have a strategy to lose. I think this work has a much more serious undertone when you apply it to how we are doing with the environment, how we are doing with political power—realities in the cycle of cultural and social climates that were not so long ago considered big successes. Then power shifts and these great successes suddenly become the biggest failures because perception has been reordered. These situations are changing so quickly that we have to be constantly altering the rules of the game to have a "winner."

BM: What does a game mean without rules? You have a set of chess pieces, but without the defined playing ground, what happens? It seems to pose an unsolvable conundrum.

RK: And the funny thing is when you have a game and rules but there’s no longer anyone willing to play. That’s the final stage, when we have nothing to else to propose. It becomes an abandoned field.

AP: It becomes a question mark. Who’s making the rules of the game?

BM: The centrepiece of the exhibition is a sculptural installation from the ongoing Beautiful Infections series titled Low Resolution Manifold. It’s a sprawling construction where the discarded materials of everyday life—cardboard, tin cans, plastic containers and the like—are built up into an urban microcosm that has been “contaminated” by a viral mapping of lines. In his essay for your touring exhibition “Nostalgia for the Present,” Mark Kingwell called these works “cities of desire”—desire being an unobtainable paradox. It’s as if the recycled excess on display signifies a social sickness: the more we want something, the less able we are to actually have it.

AP: This is the paradox of unlimited growth. We challenge this idea, we feel there is no such thing and if there is, it’s not desirable. Everything comes to an end.

RK: Yes, I would say that this piece is about unlimited growth. But there is a very strong experience behind it that for me is constantly going back to my childhood in communist Poland when there was a shortage of everything. In that industrial environment everybody was so bloody inventive and creative. If you had three bikes, one fridge and an old TV you could make one working scooter. There was a constant recycling of materials and ideas. It’s really amazing how smart these people were in finding order in this unorganized world to make life work. This is an example of the fundamental human need to organize our environment and to use anything and everything that is available to impose that order.

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