Exhibition All Directions of Wandering presents the latest acquisitions of the Lower Silesian Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts alongside works that form the core of its collection developed since 2004. Set in the context of the eponymous wandering, the featured works form a narrative that oscillates between two strategies for navigating the contemporary world – opposed to one another, yet springing from a common source.

The first concerns a form of wandering characteristic of an age of hyperproduction and hyperconsumption, driven by the compulsion towards ceaseless activity and productivity. Adopted automatically and unreflectively, this strategy ultimately erodes any clear sense of direction or purpose. It refers to a self-generating movement propelled solely by the fear of slowing down – one that, amid ubiquitous excess, becomes multidirectional, discontinuous and devoid of coherent logic. The second strategy, by contrast, emerges from resistance to this manic, endless rush, manifesting itself as a need for unhurried, observant and contemplative roaming. Considered as a form of wandering, this kind of movement sheds the entropic stigma imposed upon it by the conditions of contemporary life, revealing instead its cognitive, spiritual and creative potential.

The exhibition’s intellectual patron is Byung-Chul Han, author of the celebrated collection The Burnout Society, which explores the ways in which the imperative of positivity and productivity that governs our actions generates an invisible form of oppression. The exhibition narrative follows the trajectory of the German philosopher and sociologist’s thought. It is based on a socio-cultural and civilisational foundation that provides the point of departure for reflection on the individual. The exhibition’s narrative thus proceeds from such universal problems of contemporary reality as life under the dictates of acceleration; a deluge of products, content and possibilities; a digital regime that demands hypervisibility; excessive communication that produces disinformation; the blurring of boundaries between truth and imitation, original and substitute; and the displacement of the need for spirituality by the dogma of pleasure. It ultimately finds its culmination in the sensitive realm of internal struggles over identity. What emerges as a result is an image of extreme entanglement, in which the external world perpetually negotiates with the individual the terms of their authenticity.

Drawing on Byung-Chul Han’s thought, the exhibition places an equally strong emphasis on the need to reach those realms of inward reflection, spirituality and creativity that contemporary reality tends to disregard. While highlighting the entropic dimension of wandering, it simultaneously reveals its opposite pole. Wandering understood as an unhurried, introverted, intellectual and emotional journey, rich in the potential for self-knowledge and creation, becomes both an alternative and a response to the range of civilisational problems outlined above.

The eponymous All Directions of Wandering – most characteristically visualised in the exhibition through branching, splitting, looping and stratification – thus point towards something far more complex than a non-linear movement that loses its own centre within the two alternative strategies for navigating the contemporary world described above. Rooted in present-day social, economic and cultural concerns, wandering manifests itself throughout the exhibition in multiple contexts and directions: as uncertainty of purpose and a succession of arbitrary choices; as flâneur-like, unhurried, observational and contemplative roaming; as cognitive error; as a creative investigation of potential; as being overwhelmed by an excess of options and opportunities; as a self-aware, introspective search; as fractures that disintegrate the self; as development; and as a search for meaning.