Lustra. The Mirror as Experiment

You have to walk through the mirror maze yourself, and nobody explains the optical illusion to you. You produce it yourself. "Lustra. Między iluzją a rzeczywistością" ("Mirrors: Between Illusion and Reality") depends on visitors trying things out, with nothing simply put on show. The temporary exhibition is at the Copernicus Science Centre, Warsaw's science museum on the Vistula. The visit was on a Sunday afternoon. The centre is no art museum. Visitors are meant to get their hands on things, at several hundred interactive exhibits, and there is a planetarium, workshops and a high-voltage theatre.

The subject is the mirror, which here means reflection, symmetry, optics and perception. Technorama in Switzerland produced the show. In Warsaw it gained works by the Polish designer and architect Oskar Zięta, and with them it crosses into art. Zięta is known for steel objects inflated with compressed air. Their polished surfaces throw the surroundings back distorted. The centre explicitly presents the exhibition as a place where science meets art, and puts physics, mathematics and art side by side.

The pairing keeps that promise, and so does the approach. What the experiment shares with art is the role it gives visitors. Anyone who joins in becomes part of the arrangement and does more than look.

In an art museum a mirror is material or metaphor. In Warsaw it is an experimental set-up, and you walk through it instead of standing in front of it.

"Lustra. Między iluzją a rzeczywistością", Copernicus Science Centre (Centrum Nauki Kopernik), Warsaw.

Photo: Adrian Grycuk, CC BY-SA 3.0 PL, via Wikimedia Commons.