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Ujazdowski
Castle:: Exhibitions
May - June 2004 :: |
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the whole world + the work = the WHOLE WORLD installations, objects Exhibition on view thru 13.06 Gallery 1 Curator: Paweł Polit |
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Exhibition organized in cooperation with The
British Council
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British artist Martin Creed creates objects, installations, interventions
in public space, texts and musical compositions. In his works he
uses materials common to everyday life, including medical tape,
sheets of A4 paper, air-filled balloons and bits of Blu-Tack. This
economy of means links Creed’s work to the tradition of conceptual
art. His highly humorous pieces often seem to have no material
substance and are reduced at times to mere titles, for example,
Half of Anything Divided by Two (1996). Most often, they take the
form of subtle interventions into gallery space, as in the intriguing
Form Protruding from a Wall (2003) or Opening and Closing Doors
(1995). |
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PIPPILOTI
RIST (Switzerland), video Exhibition on view thru 13.06 Gallery 2 Curator: Milada ¦lizińska |
Exhibition under the honorary patronage of the Ambassador of Switzerland in Poland Pipilotti (Charlotte) Rist was born in Reinthal, Switzerland,
in 1962. During the first half of the 1980s, she studied
graphic design and photography in the Applied Arts Department
of the Vienna Academy and video art in Basel. I decided on
video because it allows me to do everything myself, from
the camera work through the editing. I like that about it.
Video has its characteristic features, its own inner nervousness
– and that is what I work with, says the artist. Her path
to art led through pop culture and especially music.
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Exhibition under the honorary patronage of Waldemar D±browski, Minister of Culture of the Republic of Poland |
Enthusiasts is the first extensive exhibition in Poland of Marysia
Lewandowska and Neil Cummings, two exceptional British artists
who have been working together since 1995. In their previous projects
Lewandowska and Cummings have focused on the various complications
and dependencies that arise between art institutions and the social,
economic and political spheres. The artists customarily precede
each of their projects with an extended period of detailed research
and preparations, during which they employ tools and ”languages”
developed by non-artistic fields of study like sociology, ethnography
and history.
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Sponsors: Cezex, ProfiLab
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Jan
Bar±cz, Peter Grzybowski, Jacek Malinowski, Joanna Malinowska,
Christian Tomaszewski, Wojciech Ulrich, Maciej Toporowicz |
New New Yorkers and Their Friends,
a festival organized on the initiative of the United States Embassy
in Warsaw, aims to highlight the contributions that Polish émigrés
have made to New York’s art and cultural scene. This exhibition at
Ujazdowski Castle is part of that project and includes works by artists
who though young have already recorded successes. Graduates of Polish
and American universities, they share the experience of having embarked
on their path in art in New York, whose art world is governed by a
singular set of rules.
Jacek Malinowski’s photographs are digitally processed, manipulated images of the world. “The subject is not important,” states the artist, “it can be an artificial war or crime, an artificial tragedy, an artificial birth in artificial pain, an artificial end of the world followed immediately by its artificial resurrection. A fake sunrise and sunset.” Wojciech Ulrich’s installation Red Rain is a reminiscence of an industrial slaughterhouse in the Polish district of Chicago. Rain often symbolizes cleansing, but its excess denotes tragedy or punishment, the artist believes. “Having observed the ruins of a slaughterhouse along the stinking gutter of the Chicago River, I reconstructed this three-dimensional ‘bathhouse’ standing in a rain of industrial seepage.” Maciej Toporowicz has chosen to show three video pieces: Love, Lure and the critically acclaimed Obsession. “The mixing of fragments of movies, documentaries and television advertising generates a feeling of reality lost,” says Toporowicz. Yale University graduate Joanna Malinowska offers us Untitled, a project consisting of videos that document the artist cleaning several New York City apartments, work she performed in exchange for philosophy lectures from her employers (and a piano recital in one case). Through the project the artist sought to dismantle a stereotype that reigns in the United States about “Polish cleaning ladies” being uneducated and condemned to their role. Untitled also explores certain feminist and social themes. In another gallery, Christian Tomaszewski has installed a wonderful chandelier. Where it might have had light bulbs, it possesses monitors in which an actor “performs” thirty-six statements – for the most part chosen at random – of popular contemporary artists. The primary focus of this project was not the art of acting, but rather the reprocessing of material that itself seems an overindulgence. Jan Bar±cz has built a sandbox, which in this particular place evokes certain memories of his childhood. As a youth, Bar±cz lived near Ujazdowski Castle, which had been destroyed in the 1950s, and the building’s ruins were his playground. Accompanying the exhibition, a multimedia performance by Peter Grzybowski, who uses his art to comment on contemporary political and social phenomena and events. His performances are multimedia compositions. The artist believes that the primary advantage of performance lies in the possibilities it provides for combing various artistic techniques with state-of-the-art technology. Grzybowski composes his performances from photographs, digital video, sound, television broadcasts and Internet content, combining these with dramatic actions like breaking glass. New New Yorkers will also be accompanied by a lecture (combined with a film screening) by Magda Sawoń, relating to the Postmasters Gallery in New York. Postmasters has existed and enjoyed success for the last twenty years and focuses on the new media and virtual reality. The lecture will take place at 6:00 p.m. on June 2nd in the CCA’s Cinema/Auditorium. The New New Yorkers and Their Friends Festival, Warsaw, 2004 Sponsors: Media partners:
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HARD TO GET |
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Janusz Bałdyga is a graduate of the Academy
of Fine Arts in Warsaw, where he studied painting from 1974 to
1979. He received his diploma from the studio of Professor Stefan
Gierowski in 1979. From 1977-79 he co-managed the Pracownia Dziekanka
(Dziekanka Workshop) and was a member of the Grupa Pracownia (Workshop
Group) from 1976 to 1981. He creates performances, installations
and three-dimensional objects.
The artist conveys his creative ideas using a language in which the construction of communiqués is of paramount importance. He uses common materials like boards, string or relatively simple, symbolic representations, including identification photos, maps, the silhouettes of airplanes or figurines. The actions he performs relative to his own body and objects are invariably functional, stripped of overt expression, yet simultaneously symbolic. Of Hard to Get the artist has said, “Things and ideas co-opted, appropriated by societies that have undergone limited democratic transformation come to constitute a sign of their times. They exist outside of overt processes of social evolution. They constitute a dark margin hidden by those in power. Access to ideas and material goods is disproportionate to general activity and to their social value, which often proves immeasurable. “Hard to Get” is about the early stages of deformed democracy. The first object of this series was included in the exhibition ‘Władza ludu’ / ‘Power of the People,’ which was curated by Krzysztof Żwirblis. At that time, I created a table set with things that were hard to get. The tragedy lay in their absolute unavailability or availability for the price of humiliation. Krzysztof Żwirblis said at that time, ‘This is a subtle allusion to the mystery of building paradise and the end of history, and simultaneously a call to build the essence of the table of democracy.’ The objects that seek a place for themselves in the old water cistern
enter into a discourse with this uncommon space. They respect the
laws they encounter and strengthen the intended message or do the
opposite, withdrawing, becoming observers of the brick arch. |
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The space of the Cistern will become the site
of an unusual spectacle – the spectacle of life. Tatiana Czekalska
and Leszek Golec invite us to attend an unusual performance of
transformation. In developing, any being eventually encounters
a barrier – the barrier of its body. Transformation allows a creature
to abandon its container. The being abandons it in order to enable
its own further development. A trace of this is left in exuviae,
which are “almost copies of the body’s external appearance.”
Performing a transformation culminates in the creation of a copy of what has been transformed. The being leaves a mold of its body, something akin to what is used in creating sculptures. The creature becomes a creator. In this case, the being is T.atrica, an entity whose temporarily inferior body is transformed into a work of art. The work will hardly be visible; we will probably never see traces of the performance. They will nevertheless be the thing emphasized in the space of the Cistern by Tatiana Czekalska and Leszek Golec, artists who have transformed themselves into the curators of this action and the work being created through it. The artist-curators will fill the gallery with the posts and cords usually used to keep visitors at a distance from what is worth seeing. By setting up museum barriers, creating the infrastructure required for an exhibit, Tatiana Czekalska and Leszek Golec effectively produce a sign designed to encourage us to make an effort at seeing what might be perceived with difficulty or might simply be imperceptible. Counter to what our eyes tell us, they wish to incite us to make the imaginative effort required to see a work of art emerging. Perhaps the greatest benefit of contemporary art is that in showing so little, it reveals so much. In the work of Tatiana Czekalska and Leszek Golec, the life ethic to which they have devoted themselves has transformed into a refined aesthetic, an aesthetic whose fundamental tenet calls for considering all living things as works of the highest artistry. Their fundamental idea is not one of a complete transformation that would lead to a kind of “museumification” of manifestations of life, their transformation into museum objects (which is something that might indeed need to happen if our progression towards ecological catastrophe is not stopped). Rather, they aim at an incomplete transformation — at a change in the way things are perceived. They seek solely, and as much as, a change in our way of seeing, and in turn in our way of thinking, towards one in which we will notice the works that are created through the life activities of beings that have received temporarily inferior bodies. Jarosław Lubiak
LESZEK GOLEC & TATIANA CZEKALSKA Translation: Borys Pugacz-Muraszkiewicz |
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Laura
Pawela Windows
Gallery |
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Laura Pawela’s project, designed specifically
for the newly opened Galeria Okna (Windows Gallery) at the Centre
for Contemporary Art at Ujazdowski Castle, is a series of paintings
that depict various “screen messages” of the Windows operating
system. The artist has replaced the information on system operation
contained within them with invented communiqués about her own personal
dilemmas, feelings and other, often inconsequential daily matters.
The medium of communication between the machine and humans thus
assists the artist in building and defining her identity. What
might seem cold, dehumanized and utilitarian acquires personal,
individualized features. The artist has said, “I am happy when
these understanding winks sent to me by Windows appear on the monitor;
I react to them and answer them.” By using a “dirty” painting technique
to present the digitally precise space of information, the artist
transforms the hermetic and non-tactile into something that takes
on specific, physical dimensions and textures.
The walls, ceiling and floor of the gallery have been covered in wallpaper that imitates standard desktop backgrounds. Upon this, the artist has painted the “windows” of the Windows operating system and then partly covered these by paintings that also depict elements of the computer interface. The resulting environment simulates a virtual rendition of the operating system. Laura Pawela (b. 1977) studied at the Europa Akademie in Germany and is a graduate of the Institute of Art in Opole and of the Sculpture Department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław. Currently considered one of Poland’s most promising young artists, she was nominated in 2003 for the Passport Award of “Polityka” weekly. Her paintings have also won her distinctions in the Lexmark European Art Prize competition. The Windows Gallery will strive to present work by young artists, often students. The proprietors promise to make no excuses and to present solely those projects they consider mature and demonstrative of exceptional artistic intuition. Partner: SAMSUNG
Electronics Polska
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