Honza Zamojski’s drawings are compositions constructed from lines, geometric figures, simple graphic symbols and letters. They resemble minimalist pictograms, which in principle ought to be entirely unambiguous, yet communicate complex meanings. Zamojski uses them to construct elaborate narratives, as is clearly demonstrated by his lexicon O Człowieku, który chciał objąć cały Świat [The Man Who Wanted to Encompass the Entire World. A Lexicon] (Wydawnictwo Ossolineum, 2026). Each of its eighty-one entries – devoted primarily to questions concerning ways of perceiving and organising the world for oneself – is accompanied by a drawing. Both the descriptions and the individual works illuminate one another, producing a rich weave of forms, thoughts and associations – a cosmos of signs and its environs.

It may seem that, since the advent of modernity, every attempt to apprehend the world in its entirety has been destined to fail, as the reality around us continually slips through our fingers. It is within precisely such a world that the viewer – that is, the one who sees – operates. In his lexicon, Zamojski explains that this is “one who looks, watches, glances, gazes, stares and casts an eye here and there, hoping to see something never seen before and learn something previously unknown”. In their attempts to embrace the entire world, the one who sees is characterised by curiosity, patience, vigilance and tenderness.

Zamojski’s approach might be described not so much as encyclopaedic zeal or an archival fever as a post-conceptual joke. The artist attempts to embrace the world by means of a specific procedure while simultaneously pointing to the impossibility of such an endeavour. Since Voltaire wrote: “The secret of being a bore is to tell everything,” the exhibition only offers a brisk run-through of the contents of The Man Who Wanted to Encompass the Entire World illustrating how one thing connects to another. At a time of growing interest in visual essays and exhibitions in book form, we wish to present the reverse: a book in the form of an exhibition. The Adventures of a Person Who Sees, however, is not merely an attempt to display the works that make up Zamojski’s lexicon, but to demonstrate how the book works.

The point of departure for the exhibition design was the museum’s architecture, more specifically two segments of concentric circles that define its space. These have been adapted to resemble a book fanned open. The scenographic solutions thus give shape to a formal concept in which the narrative is distributed across chapters and pages. Every section of the exhibition corresponds to a particular element of a book. In the first gallery, zones have been delineated to resemble pages with selected drawings by Zamojski, supplemented by “footnotes” in the form of works from the collections of Wrocław Contemporary Museum and the Zachęta Lower Silesian Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts, which contextualise the main narrative. The following gallery, presenting the complete series The Man Who Wanted to Encompass the Entire World, is intended to evoke a table of contents, while the adjoining reading area corresponds to a bibliography. From there, one can return to the beginning, since, like any book, The Adventures of a Person Who Sees remains open to repeated readings.