Modernity. This epoch, according to one theory, began with the outbreak of the French Revolution and then the victory of new and sublime ideas encapsulated in the slogan: liberty, equality, fraternity. According to another theory, it is associated with the breakout of yet a different revolution - the industrial one and, alongside it,  the development of soulless capitalism, introducing a strong division in society into the ones who generate profit and those who can dispose it.

The era, the end of which had been foretold many a time, each time, enriched at the most with only some newer and newer prefixes, emerged from the battle as a winner. It invariably influences the modern world: culture, science, society, politics, economy, as well as our own ideas about ourselves. In order to understand the present times, we must constantly return to modernity. The exhibition of works from the collection of the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź offers just such a cognitive journey.

We called it “Atlas” because it is a collection of maps outlining the topography of modernity – space and time, whose geographical and chronological boundaries remain fluid and undefined. As in the first edition of Atlas, these maps refer to the fourteen territories of modern space and time which we have identified and which are as follows: autonomy, experiment, emancipation, self, capital, catastrophe, machine, city, museum, norm, tradition, progress, propaganda and revolution. The new Atlas, however, has changed its character - it is not intended to describe reality, but to encourage the creation of one’s own, independent descriptions of it. In this way, Atlas expresses the opinion that there is not just one modernity and the multiplicity of its manifestations is related to and dependent on a multiplicity of ideas, visions, religions, traditions, social, economic and cultural contexts affecting it.

Atlas  is therefore also a training device to exercise our critical imagination. In today's world, shaped by numerous disturbing social phenomena, it is this very criticality that seems to be the element of the modern tradition that, above all, needs to be saved.