The practice of Polish artist Pawel Althamer is rooted in the belief system that art can impart change. Bringing together visual experience and suggestive socially-minded messages, his work is characterized by a participatory approach based on art's communicative and community-forming power. Rather than a static object, Althamer's work operates through other people's participation, collaboration, and mediation, shaping a so-called delegated experience, also reflected in his sculptural works. Attempting to re-imagine reality, Althamer's practice shifts conventional perceptions of social, political, and psychological reality.

- Sofá, 2000
is an example of Althamer's interest in discovering and emphasizing the strange and surprising potential in everyday life. Decontextualization here, like in much of the artist's practice, proves an enduring theme for Althamer, who calls into question not only the status of the artist but also the ecology of the art world itself. Assembled from rubber tires put together in a manner, which resembles a piece of furniture, the work embodies the raw aesthetic of daily life, a subversive technique, which undermines the "glamour" of the art world, and the traditional understanding of a work of art. A continuation of the artist's exploration into the motive of communal furniture, a reoccurring theme in Althamer's work, the sofa, associated with the idea of togetherness, of leisure, interaction, and social exchange, on the one hand functions as an activator of unity, while on the other, through the absence of the human body, points to the bodies impermanence and the temporary nature of man's existence.

MC