‘Stepping on rakes of bliss’ by Michał Maliński

I have been using $product for several months and I am quite satisfied, but I’ve noticed on $social_media that $brand released $product2 which is better by X% and I am thinking about buying it. Does someone use the $produkt2 and would like to share their experience? Or maybe some other brand is currently re- commended by most consumers? The great event of Black Friday is approaching and the pressure to save a few $monetary_unit forces me to make an impulsive and not fully informed decision.

Have you ever gone to a gallery or a city only to look at shop windows? Pleasant isn’t it? Do you enjoy those trips to the store just to try on clothes and put them at the checkout „until tomorrow”? Or do you sometimes order something online and never pick it up? It gives us some kind of short-term satisfaction. To perform a ritual, to move elsewhere. To participate in a pure, apparent consumption.

Maliński does almost the same, but he is not interested in the $product and certainly not the „fast” one .. He has a passion for outdated, „provincial” aesthetics. Confronted with new technologies that have a huge impact on the purchasing industry – shop windows and billboards are archaic tiktoks, and tiktok is a ne- ver-ending ad that gives you quick doses of dopamine. It delivers you content – constantly and constantly enables you to purchase virtual clothes.

It’s like a nice blanket, the easiest happiness, a fancy ornament, a sweet kitten. Maliński, on the other hand, is satisfied with what comes with time and from the past – „sweaty” plexiglass on a paper ad, broken glass, faded colors, a torn advertisement, an exceptionally ugly poster which, in the context of its environment, acquires a strange value. One that makes a point about „our times”.

Maliński, working on the non-obvious landscape of late capitalism, imagines and creates stories that no longer belong to those advertisements, to that system. $product or $advertising becomes a tool thanks to which Michał can talk about the world around him. A world that is built on appearances.