The artist himself appears in the exhibition through a self-portrait; he was the model for the human figure in the work Boy and His Dog. The hyper-realistic sculpture shows a wanderer taken straight out of a cyberpunk dystopia. Dressed in an anti-radiation suit and carrying oxygen tanks, the figure may be the survivor of a global ecological disaster, or even a cosmic hobo wandering through the solar system – in the company of a dog, of course.
Boy and His Dog resemble characters from post-apocalyptic anti-utopia movies in the vein of the Mad Max, stories whose protagonists live in a post-catastrophe world, recycling the remnants of a fallen civilisation and building peculiar hybrids of advanced technologies and primitive, improvised survival techniques. The question of technology plays an important role in many of Bąkowski’s works.
The artist often reaches for a convention that could be described low-tech cyberpunk: the human being is in a state of symbiosis with technology here, while at the same time being oppressed by it…
…fragment of Stach Szabłowski’s essay Other Flying Objects from the cataloque of Kuba Bakowski individual exhibition Air-Sculptures And Other Flying Objects at The Centre for Contemporary Art ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, 2006