Artists

Adam Kozicki

Press release

An aquarium is a place where fish and other aquatic creatures live if someone catches them and gives them the gift of life on dry land. It is not, of course, natural for a fish to live in a glass box, or to watch people and their dull, dry lives from such a position. (But what can a fish do about human ideas?) Another English term for an aquarium is “fish tank.” “Fishtank Live,” meanwhile, is an American reality show launched in 2023—one of its promotional slogans was “this is not a show.” Audiences describe “Fishtank” somewhat differently: as a mutation of the Stanford prison experiment or a radical take on “Big Brother.” As its advertising promised: “You live in the walls”—because you watch the action through cameras installed in the corners of rooms, like an imp hiding in a cobweb; “You control the action”—because what happens depends largely on you. For anything from a dozen or so to several hundred dollars, you can send contestants a gift (even an artificial rose), a challenge, a confession, or at least an insult. You can write something very kind, but for reasons unknown, people mostly choose insults. You have seen this in art more than once—from Yoko Ono’s “Cut Piece” (the artist allows the audience to interfere with her clothing), through Marina Abramović’s “Rhythm 0” (the artist allows the audience to do anything), to “Tele Game” by the Sędzia Główny group (where television viewers were invited to give the artists instructions live on air). “Fishtank” has already reached its fifth season and prompted several serious analyses attempting to get to the heart of the matter. It has not yet occurred to anyone to present this phenomenon in an art gallery. Even though “it says a lot about our society.” The exhibition “A Perfect Solution” and the paintings by Adam Kozicki presented here are not a commentary on the society that produced “Fishtank,” or on whether it is acceptable for a cultured person to watch it. Nor are the scenes from the show reproduced in paint. Yet the scenes in these paintings look as though they could have come from the show: there is the distorted perspective of a malicious fly, a space in an advanced state of decay, unattractive characters whose actions seem disjointed and incomprehensible, bottles and cigarettes strewn about. They look this way because they were inspired by “Fishtank:” as a testing ground for free will—both the participants’ and the viewers’—and as a situation in which, despite extreme discomfort, it becomes possible to feel at home. For the participants, this may mean becoming at home with themselves or moving beyond their former selves. As one member of the production team explains, the people who apply want to change something about themselves, while the audience watching them also wants to see them transformed and hopes for a happy ending. But “Fishtank” offers no “normal” makeover (at least by reality TV standards): a house built out of plasterboard in a week, a row of veneers, a hair transplant, a recording contract for an album of songs suited to breakfast television. It offers nothing but a space removed from the moral order, ready for testing one’s own and other people’s limits; something cultured people would call a place for transgression. Admittedly, this place is also controlled by the eyes of cameras in every corner of the house and a loudspeaker ready at any moment to deliver another round of insults from the outside world. Or words of encouragement, should a viewer decide to exercise their free will in that particular way. “A Perfect Solution” is a loose translation of the Latin words that glow in neon behind two figures in one of the paintings. The same words appear in an engraving illustrating an old treatise on alchemical transformation: “solutio,” the second of seven stages of transmutation—once a chemical fascination, now chiefly a psychoanalytic one. The “solutio” phase is governed by water; the preceding phase, “calcinatio,” by fire. Matter is heated intensely and ground to dust, then mixed with water so that it can recombine into something entirely different. Without this, there can be no gold from mud, no promised makeover, no new You, no new person, since alchemy is governed by the principle of “solve et coagula” (dissolve and [then] bring together). But haste is ill-advised. Nothing here is pleasant in any conventional sense, given the monsters, floods, fires, corpses, disintegration and decay. Yet, as one of “Fishtank’s” producers insists, “If you want to send a message you believe in, you have to hide it in a cake of horror.” This principle, which unites the alchemical tradition with a reality show whose educational methods are exceptionally questionable, evidently resonates with Adam Kozicki too. Accompanying Text: Aleksy Wójtowicz Translation: Michał Biela [Quotations and paraphrases of statements by “Fishtank” crew members Jet Neptune and Mints are taken from Owen Long’s article “Interactive. Violent. Gross. Inside Fishtank, the Unhinged Future of Reality TV,” published in WIRED on 17 June 2026, https://www.wired.com/story/interactive-violent-gross-inside-fishtank-the-unhinged-future-of-reality-tv/]