Thank you, Postman,
Postal Museum, Helsinki, Finland, 1996.
Thank you, Postman was a 1996 exhibition at the Postal Museum in Helsinki centered on Alain Baczynsky's mail-related art. In the catalog introduction, Postal Museum director Jari Karhu explains that a friend had brought Baczynsky's work to his attention and thanks the artist for allowing the museum to bring his personal artistic message to Finland and Helsinki. Karhu presents the exhibition as a celebration of friendship and as an acknowledgment of letter carriers, mail sorters, and postmen, and dedicates it to the memory of Elis Sella.
The catalog contains an extensive historical and personal account of Mail Art. The text surveys the development of Mail Art internationally, its Finnish history, Takalo-Eskola's network contacts, and the non-juried, decentralized principles he associated with the medium.
The later illustrated pages reproduce envelopes, postcards, postal collages, and other mail-art material. Most of these reproductions could be attributed to Baczynsky because they appear in the section associated with his work.
A later interview with Alain Baczynsky provides compatible, though not independently project-identifying, context: he recalled recovering letters he had sent to friends and subsequently being contacted by a curator in Finland who wanted to present the material in a major Helsinki museum. The interview does not itself give the title Thank you, Postman, so it is used only as supplementary evidence. Centre Pompidou records Baczynsky as a Belgian-Israeli photographer born in Brussels in 1953.
