Don't Miss New Exhibitions at the Galerienhaus, Lindenstr 34-35

Opened on 11/21/2009:

Galerija Gregor Podnar

Goran Petercol, 15 Views of Glass on view until 09/01/10

http://www.gregorpodnar.com/index.html

ZAK BRANICKA

Szymon Kobylarz, Civil Defense on view until 30/01/10

http://www.zak-branicka.com/

The KNOT: coming soon to Berlin, Bucharest and Warsaw

The Knot is a temporary, mobile structure which is travelling to Berlin, Warsaw and Bucharest in the year of 2010, where it will constitute a micro-model for what could be a better city of the present.

Designed by architectural office raumlabor Berlin and with a programme conceived by Temporary Curators Collective (Markus Bader, Oliver Baurhenn, Jakub Szreder, Raluca Voinea), The Knot is a place for presence, interaction and collaboration, as well as a crucible of ideas that could engender a common dream.

It is part of the wider project The Promised City, initiated by Goethe-Institut Warsaw and Polnisches Institut Berlin.

More updates to come about the project in 2010

Kasia Fudakowski, lately

Kasia Fudakowski is a participating panelist at Ekspektatywa - an Interdisciplinary Cycle

Organized by the New Culture Foundation Bec Zmiana, Ekspektatywa refers to a state of waiting with expectations laded with hope, directly related to the developing future. "Intentionally referring to unrealized projects and ideas based on trusting in technological development, the goal of the project was to share experiences dealing with technological development and to activate dialogue between art and science."

A series of six events are taking place for which an artist and a scientist are both invited to speak. Each event as well results in a publication.

Kasia Fudakowski, along with David Alvarez Castillo, will be speaking today at 17h

Take a look at the website for more information about the event:

http://www.ekspektatywa.pl

Also, preview images of Kasia Fudakowski most recent works:

ZAK BRANICKA on Art Paper Invitations

Zak Branicka's upcoming exhibition,
Szymon Kobylarz's Civil Defense opens
Friday, November 20th 6-9pm

See link on Art Paper Invitations

Paranoid protuberances of science are Szymon Kobylarz’s source of inspiration. He is interested in quasi-scientific absurdities and the border on which rationality and obsession fester.

This theme was already present in his thesis exhibition for which he composed the fictional interior of a Euthanasia proffering institution. The rooms, cloned at a smaller scale, fuse the lack of ambiguity of a reception area with the strangeness of a planned suicide.

Science and obsession also meet in the work, Mr. Jan Kolano’s Cell (Cela Pan Jana Kolano, 2008). Kobylarz reconstructed the story of a murderer and a genius based on various media sources. Jan Kolano spent 20 years in prison where he worked without any instruments to make discoveries that were awarded recognition by scientists.

In his newest work, realized for Gallery ZAK BRANICKA, Kobylarz utilizes experiences from his school days. At that time and in light of the Cold War, all the Warsaw Agreement member states established “Civil Defense” courses. The subject matter of these lessons regarded defense mechanisms pertaining to various threats and the requisite behavior in the case of catastrophe. The children learned First Aid measures. They also obtained basic knowledge of the building and handling of weapons.

For Kobylarz, the “Civil Defense” course had a completely different meaning: it was a frame in which the boys were finally allowed to play war. At that time as well as now, he is so engaged by the provisional and abstruse conception of homemade emergency equipment that he dedicated the entire exhibition to it.

As usual, archival materials form the point of origin for the work: he retraced the antique safety instructions, constructing their modern caricature. Today, one can find countless short films and documents about homemade weapons on the Internet. If one were to type “how to do + weapons” into a search engine, he or she would run into fabrications that can be quite dangerous, although in most cases the findings would be the extravagant fantasies of private tinkerers.

Kobylarz is interested in these constructions as an example of uncontrolled knowledge. As a dabbler endowed with the very Polish talent of being able to make anything out of nothing, he is also fascinated in the handiwork behind these objects. He has collected the examples that he found on the Internet and built an entire series of homemade versions for urban survival: a macaroni-bomb, a gasmask made of Coca Cola bottles, a smoke grenade constructed from a ping pong ball, a potato flint and a periscope fashioned out of an empty milk carton. ZAK BRANICKA displays these absurd and simultaneously comical, but surprisingly well functioning objects in classical weapon vitrines, strengthening the ambiguity between crackpot dabbling and dangerous reality.

With “Civil Defense” Kobylarz asks the questions, what happens to science if it takes a wrong turn? How far can science let itself be compromised and perverted? While working on this project, the artist transformed himself into a kook inventor and in that process he turned towards an antiquated artistic model: he has repositioned art between science and Utopia.

Roza Janiszewska, "Barsoi" @ TÄT Galerie Berlin

Image courtesy of TÄT

Roza Janiszewska's exhibition, Barsoi, closes tonight, 10.11.09
Finissage: 19.00 Uhr / 7 pm

TÄT is located at Schönhauser Allee 161, Berlin 10435

ZAK BRANICKA @ Artissima

ZAK BRANICKA presents


Katarzyna Kozyra, Zofia Kulik, Agnieszka Polska, Pawel Ksiazek and Hubert Czerepok
Booth: Verde B/Green B, No. 10
at Artissima '09 in Torino Italy
November 6-8th

Don't Miss...

From London to New York and then back to Berlin, here are some exhibition and performance highlights of Polish artists working internationally that are not to be missed:

In London:

Robert Kusmirowski's Bunker at the Barbican Art Gallery, London
http://www.barbican.org.uk/thecurve/blog/index.html


The Unilever Series: Miroslaw Balka presents How It Is in the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/unilevermiroslawbalka/default.shtm


"Balka intends to provide an experience for visitors which is both personal and collective, creating a range of sensory and emotional experiences through sound, contrasting light and shade, individual experience and awareness of others, perhaps provoking feelings of apprehension, excitement or intrigue."
- Tate Modern


In New York:

Performa '09

Rainer Ganahl presents "UBU Lenin" on Friday, November 13th 9:30pm
at the Swiss Institute
http://performa-arts.org/blog/rainer-ganahl/


Christian Tomaszewski and Joanna Malinowska present "Mother Earth, Sister Moon", Wednesday, November 4th - Saturday November 21st at varying times (check schedule)
at chashama 679


In Berlin:

You can still catch Robert Kusmirowski's photographs and objects at the Polish Institute until 13.11.09

and Domink Lejman's Afterparty at ZAK BRANICKA until 14.11.09

SCHISM. Polish Art from the 90's.

curated by Adam Mazur
Centre for Contemporary Art Zamek Ujazdowski
Ul. Jazdow 2 00-467 Warsaw
www.csw.art.pl


Opening Friday October 9, 2009 at 18.00
exhibition open until November 15, 2009
Works by :
Miroslaw Balka, Jerzy Truszkowski, Zofia Kulik, Artur Zmijewski, Zygmunt Rytka,
Zbigniewa Libera, Mikolaj Smoczynski, Piotr Jaros, Mariola Przyjemska, Alicja Zebrowska,
Jozef Robakowski, Zbigniew Dlubak, Wilhelm Sasnal, Wlodzimierz Borowski,
Marcin Maciejowski, Jaroslaw Modzelewski, Marek Kijewski, Wlodzimierz Pawlak,
Rafal Bujnowski, Edward Krasinski, Pawel Althamer

new works from the CCA's by :
Andrzej Dluzniewski, Leszek Golec/Tatiana Czekalska, Katarzyna Kozyra, Wojciech Prazmowski

Special projects
Mikolaj Dlugosz, Roman Dziadkiewicz, Maurycy Gomulicki/Krystian Kujda, Nicolas Grospierre
Schism - the exhibition's title refers to a memorable booklet of poems by Marcin Świetlicki that highlights the difference and line dividing the People's Republic of Poland and the current Third Republic of Poland. In Poland, the 1990s were time of revaluation and forging of a new definition of a work of art, artist and art institutions, creation of a new language of art criticism, a fulcrum for the tension between artist and society, appearance of curators, and propagation of the "problem exhibition" medium. The art of the 90s originates in Polish art of the preceding decades and, like many of the active artists during that time, has its pedigree in the People's Republic of Poland, though it is also an attempt to move away from, or even break with, the previously dominant attitudes, styles and forms of artistic activity.


The first part of Schism is a revisionist presentation of selected works of art from the CCA International Contemporary Art Collection spanning the last 20 years (from Zbigniew Libera, Katarzyna Kozyra and Artur Żmijewski, Zygmunt Rytka, Jerzy Truszkowski, Zofia Kulik, to Paweł Althamer, Marek Kijewski, and Mirosław Bałka), which constitutes a significant point of reference for the artistic community, critics and curators by initiating a debate over the meaning of contemporary art in the coalescing civil society of a country undergoing systemic transformation. Time has shown that the CCA Ujazdowski Castle program provided an original offer and brought art into the new realities of the democratic Republic of Poland.

The second part of Schism presents source materials concerning activities of the Ujazdowski Castle in 1989-1999, focusing on extensively commented events from the CCA program, exhibitions such as Paradise Lost, Magicians and Mystics, Bakunin in Dresden, Ideas Beyond Ideology, Antibodies, Image Borders, and At This Particular Time. Archived materials shown in the space symbolically abandoned by the collection supplement interviews with CCA curators. A separate sequence shows films from individual exhibitions, such as those by Jan Świdziński, Zbigniew Warpechowski, Alicja Żebrowska, Roman Stańczak, and Joanna Rajkowska. A reflection on the CCA program recalls the beginnings of the discussion about the limits of art and context of its functioning in the public sphere. The presentation ends with a fluid transition from institutional policy to aesthetics (Maurycy Gomulicki, Mikołaj Długosz, Roman Dziadkiewicz). Nostalgia for the 1990s, visible in music and objects of cult and banality, provides a better image of the now historical dimension of those years.


Schism is an open research project with an "archaeology of contemporaneity" which includes the collection, classification and a critical review of documents, interviews, and interpretation of works of art from that time.

Institute of Contemporary Art–Dunaujvaros presents Agents & Provocateurs

The exhibition Agents & Provocateurs surveys certain forms of confrontation: agency and provocation, both understood as dissenting artistic attitudes. The project explores to what degree these stances prove to be viable forms of protest in different and changing political contexts. Starting out from the counter-cultural scenes of state-socialist East Central Europe, the exhibition asks what sort of critical potential the oppositional artistic positions of the time really had, with provocation and irritation as frequent vehicles of artists' defiance. Was "oppositional" a (self-)chosen stance, or did the narrow confines of a repressive regime constitute dissident thinkers so? Did artists engage with the various aspects of social reality under an autocratic political rule, or were they rather concerned over the infringements of their artistic and individual freedom?

Agents & Provocateurs goes on asking how oppositional strategies in state-socialist times determine the absence or presence of critical artistic positions today, and how they relate to the transformation of a more broadly understood political culture. Within the context of the much-desired democracy, is the individual prepared to take advantage of the situation that democratic power wielding, theoretically, no longer infantilizes, silences, or paralyzes critically-minded individuals but perceives them as potential social actors? Does a transformed political climate prompt strategies other than mere defiance, protest, and antagonism to articulate discontent? Is the continuing practice of provocation sustainable or dysfunctional in political democracies, or does it reproduce patterns of thinking and acting that were acquired under an oppressive system?

Certainly, any political, economic, social or cultural system has its oppressive features and unjust hierarchies. Agents & Provocateurs therefore asks how genuinely critical attitudes need to reconfigure again and again in order to capture these? The exhibition presents cases in which cultural workers do not remain the passive victims, witnesses, or commentators of events; when they do not merely criticize and point to disturbing issues, but do act, mobilising their agency. The focus is on instances when artists think of themselves as social agents and are willing to work politically with the "enemy". The predominantly East-Central European cases will be juxtaposed with, and accentuated by, contemporaneous examples from contexts with different political cultures.

Instead of a touring exhibition, the compilation of an "exhibition kit" or "mobile archive" is devised as an afterlife of the show. The archive — partly available on the project's website— will contain additional materials accumulated during preparation and research, and will be offered for loan to art schools and institutions internationally. The compiled material is to be activated through workshops and educational modules organised in collaboration with the network of artists and experts established in the process of realising the project.

Featured artists include
Julius von Bismarck (D), Scott Blake (US), budapest reconstruction (H), Ondrej Brody (CZ), Jan Budaj (SK), Ildiko Enyedi (H), VALIE EXPORT (A), Exterra XX (D), Filoart (int.), Ion Grigorescu (RO), Andris Grinbergs (LV), Igor Grubic (HR), Hungarian Two-Tailed Dog Party (H), IRWIN (SLO), Istvan Kantor (CND), Judit Kele (H/F), Andreja Kuluncic (HR), Ivank Lazki (AR), Zbigniew Libera (PL), Neue Slowenische Kunst (SLO), Orange Alternative (PL), Tanja Ostojic (RS/D), Ewa Partum (PL/D), Pro Agit (Zofia Kulik, Przemislaw Kwiek, Zygmunt Piotrowski, Anastazy Wisniewski) (PL), Tamás St.Auby (H), János Sugár (H), the project Künstler informieren Politiker (D), The Yes Men (US), Untergunther (CH/F), Zelimir Zilnik (RS)

Curators
Beata Hock and Franciska Zolyom

Venue
Institute of Contemporary Art
Vasmu ut 12
2400 Dunaujvaros, Hungary
Opening hours: 10-18, Monday - Saturday

Contact:
info@ica-d.hu

The project is supported by
Erste Foundation, Vienna
International Visegrad Fund, Bratislava
Hungarian National Cultural Fund
Polish Cultural Institute Budapest

Paweł Książek at Art Stations Foundation in Poznan

Paweł Książek, Silent Utopia

Paweł Książek's project, “Silent Utopia", is a fantasy that merges Eastern European modernism with German expressionist Fritz Lang’s silent cinema. The presented work makes reference to the film, Metropolis, and to Eastern European architecture of the Interwar period. The project debuted at Art Basel Statements in 2009. The exhibition at Art Stations Foundation is intended as a continuation of that presentation, but here the installation will be additionally confronted with such vintage documents from the 20’s and 30’s as the plans and studies made for the architectural and scenographic realizations of one of the major German architects of that period, Hans Polezig.

Exploring the ties between modernist architecture and cinema, Paweł Książek analyses hypothetical proofs that would indicate the existence of a universal aesthetic sensitivity common to the artists of the day. Based on his studies of the aesthetics of that period, he speculates about how the film could look, and how the images of its single frames would be altered, if as scenography we took Czech, Hungarian or Polish modernist architecture from the era before the global catastrophe. What would it look like and how would it alter the context if Metropolis had been shot in Prague with the modernist Bata shoe shop as the background (Ludvik Kysela, Prague 1929)? Could Cafe ERA in Brno (Jozsef Kranz, 1927) replace the building with the neon “ERA” sign from one of the film's night scenes? Finally, why wasn't the film actually shot on Warsaw's “Future Street” (“Ulica Przyszłości”) designed by Lech Niemojewski in 1925?

As it appears, the connections between cinema and architecture, which Książek so ardently pursues, are not pure speculations – in fact they do have a historical explanation. There is no denying that architecture is of primary importance to the film: Fritz Lang himself admits that his vision of architectural future was directly inspired by New York's skyline, which he saw on one of his journeys. “I saw a street that by means of neon lights was lit as brightly as if it were day. (...) The skyscrapers functioned as an opulent theatre-set hung to dazzle, dispel, and hypnotize from a dismal sky”, he wrote. German expressionist cinema perfectly shows how film could and did become an area in which the architects of the 20s and 30s could freely experiment and carry out even the most utopian visions. The exhibition will feature the original sketches by Hans Polezig that he made for Paul Wegener's Golem, another masterpiece of German silent film. Looking at them, one might actually start wondering where the boundary lays between futuristic extravaganza generated in an architect's imagination and scenographic artificiality.

Bringing in the taste of the modernist era and showing us the incredible imagination of its creators and thinkers, Hans Poelzig's sketches help to establish a broader context for Książek's work. Poelzig was a truly visionary architect. In fact, many of his projects in themselves look a bit like scenographic work: his buildings are tall, strong and mighty, drawn from a worm's-eye view, they seem as though the monumental set design for a city scene in which each incidental passer-by becomes an actor.

The exhibition combines two worlds, that of cinema and that of architecture, one serving as a source of inspiration for the other – on the one hand, we have film director Fritz Lang, who employed architects for designing scenography for his filmwork, and on the other, we have architect Hans Poelzig, who next to scenography, designed cinema and theater buildings.

Dominik Lejman @ art berlin contemporary

Closed Circuit, 2009.
digital video

Dominik Lejman at Art Berlin Contemporary.

def - drafts establishing future

From the 23rd to the 27th of September, 64 galleries presented projects by around 80 artists, both emerging and established, intended for the public space.

"Many of the works - some practical, others utopian - have been created of were adapted from historical proposals specifically for the exhibition, which [took] place at the Academy of Arts in Berlin's Hansaviertel. The enduring fascination of Belrin has inspried artists to take part in this year's abc exhibition. Each artist's project contributes to the ongoing public debate around the city's inner urban space, giving the discussion an international platform and generating lively publicity for Berlin."

Courtesy of abc

Domink Lejman's contribution to the exhibition, Closed Circuit (pictured above), explores explores this idea of public and private spaces by testing the boundary between.

Here are some more images of the exhibition:

Vadim Fiskin, "Ping-Pong Electronic" c/o Galerija Gregor Podnar

Monika Sosnowska, "Dirty Fountain" c/o Capitain Petzel

Cezary Bodzianowski c/o Foksal Foundation

Exhibition View

Menschenbilder 1620/2009

Michal Jankowski, Pawel Ksiazek and Zofia Kulik are participating in the exhibition Menschenbilder 1620/2009 at Museum Abtei Liesborn in Wadersloh-Liesborn.

21.6.2009 - 16.8.2009

www.museum-abtei-liesborn.de

www.kunstfreunde-blog.de/ausstellung/menschenbilder-aus-der-sammlung-sor-rusche-in-liesborn

Robert Kuśmirowski 1939-2009 in Polnisches Institut Berlin

The Polish Institut shows photos and objects of Robert Kuśmirowski.

01.09 - 13.11.2009

http://berlin.polnischekultur.de

SZYMON KOBYLARZ in Zacheta, Kordegarda Gallery

ECHELON70 is the new project of Szymon Kobylarz to be on display until 18 October 2009 at Galeria Kordegarda (Zacheta - National Gallery of Art) in Warsaw.

Opening: September 4, 2009

Szymon Kobylarz's newest project, specially prepared for the Kordegarda Gallery is the latest in the line of the artist's experiments with the gallery spaces and artistic genres. The title of the exhibition ECHELON 70, refers to the name of the powerful system of the control of the transmission of electronic data that for some time has been arousing lively discussion. The life of contemporary people is subjected to ever greater control.
It is particularly the inhabitants of cities who feel observed (by systems of urban cameras that ensure their safety). The consciousness of being controlled gives birth to a fear of the excessive limitation of freedom. On the one side, we want to feel safe in an alarming contemporary world, on the other, we start to have a feeling of a loss of control over our own lives. It is precisely this sort of Orwellian urban legend that Szymon Kobylarz, as someone that has become especially drawn to questions on the border between the fields of science, technology, the military and conspiracy theories, took as his starting material. "Odd" discoveries that emerge outside the frame of his original assumptions have become the object of the artist's particular interest.

Kobylarz likes to tell stories, build parallel realities, confuse tropes and lay traps for the viewer. Visiting an exhibition of his can at times recall a journey into the world of a virtual game. And this time the artist invites the viewer to let the imagination run free, to contemplate and find one's own answer to the intriguing questions that the exhibition asks. What are the white balls situated in the baroquely decorated interior of Kordegarda? Sometimes Doppler radars probably used in the Echelon system, a modernist sculpture, a warning against excessive enthusiasm for a utopia, or a symbol of the enslavement of a person by a state-police system?

www.zacheta.art.pl

Hubert Czerepok: devil's island, at La Criée - Centre d'Art Contemporain Rennes.

Hubert Czerepok's solo exhibition, Devil's Island, opened May 22, 2009 at La Criée. 22.05.2009 - 26.07.2009
At the core of Czerepok`s oeuvre are the connections between fiction, topicality and historical events. It is not the facts themselves that interest the artist, but rather the way they begin with shifts, mutations, and unimaginable formal and semantic transformations.For Devil’s Island (2009), the video installation on show at La Criée, the artist visited the rocky islet off the coast of Kourou in French Guiana, famed for the penal colony to which many French political prisoners – including Alfred Dreyfus – were condemned. The images he brought back are projected onto a hexagonal sculpture referencing another form of disciplinary power: the Panopticon. Part of a circular prison building, the Panopticon allows full-time surveillance of prisoners without their knowing if they are being watched or not, the result being a sense of invisible omniscience.The exhibition also includes a series of drawings, Seances, which brings together media images relating to some tragic current event, spiritualist séances or sexual scenes. The initial Seances series retained only a minimal trace of the originals, while the images made for the Rennes exhibition combine areas of flat black with line drawing. Here Czerepok pays tribute to Goya’s Disasters of War engravings and their demonstration of all the atrocious cruelty mankind is capable of. In this new look at glamorised, mass-produced media violence, the artist forces the image back into its genuinely traumatising, critical role.The Devil’s Island exhibition comprises a highly diverse selection of works that lead us to reflect on different forms of power, the way they are depicted and the impact of this depiction on our lives.

www.criee.org

Yane Calovski, Master Plan/Hollow Land at the European Kunsthalle, Köln

Yane Calovski: Master Plan/Hollow Land is presented within the exhibition series "Appearance/Auftritt", with Julia Scher, Katja Davar, Miriam Bäckström and Yane Calovski, September 11-October 10, 2009.
See also www.kunsthalle.eu

Yane Calovski, Hollow Land, video still, 2009.

Courtesy the artist, Het Blauwe Huis, Amsterdam, and Zak Branicka Gallery, Berlin.

In a place without history, what do we remember? This is the central question behind Yane Calovki's film "Hollow Land" (2009, 8:13 min), a video essay about Ijburg, a new city district in Amsterdam. Invited to make the district „his place“, „Hollow Land" refers to Jean-Luc Godard's short film about Lausanne, “Letter to Freddy Buache,” and its articulated impossibility of representing all facets of a city. The conclusion: "Fiction is necessity." Fictional moments in urban projects also play a significant role in Calovski's second work presented on Ebertplatz, "Master Plan“ (2008). Here, the artist takes Japanese architect Kenzo Tange's plans for Skopje's reconstruction in the wake of the 1963 earthquakes as a point of departure – a complex investigation with the ways in which the rational realm of diagrams and graphics overlaps with the mystical realm of illusions, and how plans for tomorrow age in their realization.

EUROPEAN KUNSTHALLE

Ebertplatzpassage; D-50668 Cologne

ph +49.(0)221.5696.140 / f +49.(0)221.5696.142

wege@kunsthalle.eu / www.kunsthalle.eu

Anabasis: Jaroslaw Flicinski, Kasia Fudakowski and Agnieszka Polska opening on Saturday 05.09 in Lodz

ANABASIS. RITUALS OF HOMECOMING

05.09 - 04.10.2009

Artists: Lida Abdul, Helena Almeida, Mieke Bal, Yael Bartana, Rita Sobral Campos, Jonas Dahlberg, Danilczyk & Krakowska, Edith Dekyndt, Elmgreen & Dragset, Famed, Jaroslaw Flicinski, Kasia Fudakowski, Tadeusz Kantor, Agnieszka Kurant, Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler, Lothar Hempel, Marine Hugonnier, Susanne Kriemann, Sharon Lockhart, Ernesto Neto, Adrian Paci, Mai-Thu Perret, Agnieszka Polska, Pedro Cabrita Reis, Mathilde Rosier, Esther Stocker, Andrey Tarkovsky

Venue:
Ludwik Grohman Villa, ul. Tylna 9/11
Book Art Museum, ul. Tymienieckiego 24
Lodz, Poland

Curator: Adam Budak

Coordination: Ola Knychalska

Opening: 5 September at 5.00 p.m. till 6:00 a.m.
Organizer: Festival of Dialogue of Four Cultures

"roads of the world, we follow you. authority over all the signs of the earth. O traveller in the yellow wind, lust of the soul!... and the seed (as you say) of the Indian cocculus possesses (if you mash it!) intoxicating properties. a great principle of violence dictated our fashions".

...with these words French poet, Saint-John Perse concludes his poem „Anabasis“ (1924), one of the most important works of his entire literary ouevre for which he received Nobel Prize in 1960. It is with this poem which depicts „the earth given over to explanations“ Saint-John Perse, according to French philosopher, Alain Badiou, perceived the century’s epic dimension. It is there where the notion of „anabasis“ receives its most profound – contemporary – meaning. Referring to a narrative by Greek soldier and writer, Xenophon entitled „Anabasis“ which reported an expedition of a troop of Greek mercenaries from a coastline up into the interior of a country, „anabasis“ is the name for the „homeward“ movement, the movement of lost men, out of place and outside the law and as such, according to Badiou, it may serve as a possible support for a meditation on the XXth century and beyond. The Greek word „to anabase“ which means both „to embark“ and „to return“ seems to aptly describe the century which ceaselessly had been oscillating between its own beginning and end. This century is marked by the urge for and a necessity of a movement – homecoming, search for roots, desperate need to construct a „new“ order, an experience of beginning. „anabasis“ indicates such a movement – the ceaseless journey, displacement, a principle of lostness and an unprecedented return from (eternal) wandering lie at the root of „anabasis“. Perse defines this notion in the most picturesque and sincere way, writing about childhood, about memory, about neverending travelling, about experience of exile and community, about love and about... wind... In his essay „Anabasis“, included in the anthology „The Century“, Badiou confronts Perse’s version of the anabasis with the one depicted in the poem by Paul Celan (1963). This version – already closer to our moment of time and life – complements Perse’s. For Celan, we are not at home, we haven’t succeeded neither to begin a journey according to previously recognized path and planned itinerary: "we are, in what constitutes an admirable nomination of the anabasis as well as of the entire century: 'far out / into the unnavigated'. And it is precisely here, at the point of unknowing and bewilderment, that the 'Upward and Back' must be undertaken; it is here that we stake our claim of one day being able to turn towards 'the heart-bright future'. it is here that the anabasis is invented" (Alain Badiou).

But in fact as it seems – the paradigm for the inventive dynamism of the anabasis can be found in the story of the Odyssey, a discourse on exodus, which, as Michel Serres explains, is not an encyclopedia of knowledge but it rather represents a scalenopeadia, unbalanced in parts, signifying lameness, describing an oblique, twisting, complicated path: “Ulysses takes scalene routes and thus discovers and invents, routes of Greekness, those of non-redundant cultures. Cultures with history. Non-recycled history, not recyclable into a balanced or preconceived model, into a model in the two senses of the word, both theoretical and optimal. The first words of history are an exodus. There are cultures in which that history forms a scenario rehearsing legislation or structures, self-evidently present, or buried and yet to be revealed, a characteristic scenario, a methodical journey. We are beginning to know how to construct them, these schemes are no longer unfamiliar to us. One or two cultures came along in which history freed itself from this equilibrium, and begun to fluctuate outside the cycles, to branch outside repetitive schemas, to abandon itself to scalene paths. Ulysses navigating without a care in the world leaves behind closed knowledge and histories constrained by structures, he invents inventive knowledge and open history, a new time” (Michel Serres).

The story of Ulysses (the meaning of his journey as the paradigm of the return home throughout western culture and the curvy “unnavigated” path of his wandering) hovers above the exhibition “Anabasis. Rituals of Homecoming” and, together with the “anabasis” as a guideline and itinerary, it is loosely being considered as a template (one of many in fact…) to map the phenomenon of delirious Lodz and its own history and knowledge, dispersed and distributed, not integrated into totality, always deviating.

As an integral part of the Festival the Dialogue of Four Cultures, which this year is programmed around the issues related to the notion of TERRITORY, the exhibition “Anabasis. Rituals of Homecoming” considers various dimensions of homecoming – between intimacy and public exposure, interiority and a monument, personal and collective mythologies – as templates to rethink our relationship towards the past, history and memory. Here, childhood, migration and exile, leaving aside your national belonging, coming back from a factory, ordinary returns that belong to the practice of everyday life and the cultural/political heritage are perceived as rites that negotiate passages of our life. Home as an archetypal place and its prototype, home as a mythological and a real place we come from, the primal shelter and the site of unmediated presence; a homecomer – the conceptual personae of the Socius – as an active agent in the formation of territories; and a homecoming as a primordial act we carry with ourselves through the entire life of ours: sentimental (‘will I be missed?’) but traumatic too and perceived as an experience of repression (‘home is the place you left’). This exhibition approaches an act of homecoming critically as a heterotopic experience and a crucial component of becoming but also as a phantasmagoria. Here, it is being associated with Derridian “spacing” and “tracing”, and it marks a specific attempt at “writing” or “story-telling”. Homecoming “writes” pages of life as a journey out of oblivion and one’s identity as an on-going act of wandering. It is a method and a reference, an essential component of Deleuzeian sensation: the vibration, the embrace or the clinch, or the withdrawal, division, distension.

Partly homage to a city of a wounded fabric, this exhibition is a reflection upon a situation that generated an impossibility of homecoming. As a stage for a mental quasi-reenactment of a mythical return, Lodz – a modern city of a future, another attempt of utopia, ‘promised land’ – appears as both a void of no integral identity and a receptacle of failed in-placements and constant displacements, a matrix of failure, indeed. Rootless and ungrounded, temporary and transitory, it brings in a definition of home, which oscillates between the parasitic and the appropriate. Rapid economic growth and industrial boom of the mid-19^th century, as well as dramatic political upheavals of the last two centuries and the current lame development in the shadow of the capital – turned Lodz into an urban and cultural edifice of a porous identity, an intercultural zone of diversity, on the one hand, but on the other – of broken tides, unwanted belongings and instability. Here, the rhetoric of a house and a politics of place and homecoming are conducted upon the absence of the vernacular – in a network of lines of flight and deterritorializations (Deleuze) that generated a city as a place inhabited but unsettled. Historically and contemporary, Lodz apparently has always been a para-site: ‘never quite’ taking place as part of its performance, of its success as an event, of its taking place; being neither inside nor outside a house, that which is beyond, and yet essential to, the space. Thus Lodz – the ghost town and an uncanny site, where we are “not at home”, constantly alienated, detached and defamiliarized, an estranged place of ‘far away so close’ – functions as a machine to rethink and to disfigure the contemporary understanding of a home as an enclosure and shelter, a primary site of belonging and proximity, the proper (oikeios) place of Celan’s ‘We’.

“Anabasis. Rituals of Homecoming” has been choreographed as a set of tentative chapters: contemplation of a home, home as a process, belonging to a place, fate of place (a residue and a site of transformation), impossible homecoming and a trauma of displacement, performing nostalgia and longing, ruin and the architecture of memory, childhood rites and the ethics of labor, reenactments of personal memory… They operate as mirrors reflecting back the individual and the collective, the political and the private, overlapping singular biographies and pages of history, along the curved lines of the past and the present. All invited to this exhibition artists perform a tension that on the one hand alludes to the inner voyage of Andrey Tarkowski’s “Mirror” (a fetishisation of home and necessity of inner exile) and on the other, it echoes an ironic and decadent study of nostalgia and the subject’s deconstruction in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Le Mepris” with its ironic reenactment of Odyssey as yet another potentiality and symbolic of the archetypal theme of homecoming. As a collection of rituals, this exhibition is an exercise in distancing and proximity, on the way to delineate a psychological space of estrangement and familiarity.

Some of the artists conceived projects that directly respond to the city of Lodz, the location and the exhibition’s theme. “Anabasis” will feature amongst others, the premiere of three new works by Pedro Cabrita Reis (a light mural, a reenactment of Kobro’s “Composition in Space” in the Park of Kilinski, a limited edition of a poster developed in a collaboration with the Museum of Art Book), new interventions by Esther Stocker and Jaroslaw Flicinski, a new sculpture by Rita Sobral Campos, inspired by a relief, depicting Hercules, found in the villa of the Museum of Art Book, new photographs of Susanne Kriemann from her on-going series “Untitled (Alphabet)”, new film “Courtyards of Lodz” by Sharon Lockhart, a new project by Agnieszka Kurant (a new rendering of Godard’s “La Chinoise”), new video installation of Edith Dekyndt (“Here/There”), new site-specific sound installation by Ernesto Neto, new sculpture “Styx” by Lothar Hempel, new versions of works by Yael Bartana (“Summer Camp”, accompanied by a new series of photographs) and Mai-Thu Perret (“Evening of the Book”) as well as works by FAMED (including a neon work “Will I Be Missed?”, installed on the façade of Grohmann Villa), Adrian Paci (including his sculpture “Home to Go” and film “Per Speculum”), Marine Huggonier (and her trilogy “Territory”), Hubbard&Birchler (with their uncanny film “House with Pool”), Agnieszka Polska (with her film “Calendar”), Kasia Fudakowski (a selection of her recent sculptures), a selection of installations and poetic sculptures by Mathilde Rosier, a monumental video installation by Mieke Bal (“Nothing Is Missing”), a unique embroidery by Elmgreen&Dragset (“Home Is the Place You Left”), two films by Jonas Dahlberg (including his recent “View Through the Park”), films by Lida Adbul (and especially her “What They Saw Upon Awakening, depicting the ruins of her hometown, Kabul), impressive photographs by Helena Almeida from her “Experience of Space” series and – last but not least – two very recent works by Tadeusz Kantor (including a painting “Ma Maison”). The exhibition’s highlight will consist of a unique and profound study of identity and homecoming – a set of 80 polaroids of Andrey Tarkowski.

“Anabasis. Rituals of Homecoming” takes place in charming interiors of the late 19^th century villa of German industrialist, Ludwig Grohmann, one of Lodz’s first luxury residencies that proved a high economic prosperity of a town around the turn of the centuries. Designed in 1889 by Hilary Majewski, its architecture alludes to Italian renaissance. A special part of the exhibition, including a unique set of Andrey Tarkowski’s polaroids (“Instant Light”) has been staged in located nearby villa of Henryk Grohmann (built in 1892), with eclectic interiors, referring, amongst others, to Viennese Secession, partly and most likely designed by Otto Wagner, now becoming a home of Museum of Art Book, with an exceptional collection of art books, owned by Jadwiga and Janusz Tryznowie and a unique atelier with old printing machines.

The extended vernissage (September 5/6) includes performances (Mathilde Rosier, Danilczyk/Krakowska, Kriemann/Roelstraete), late-night screenings (Lockhart, Tarkowski, Godard, Kantor), and talks (roundtable with the artists as well as the conversation with the son of Andriej Tarkowski, Andriej A. Tarkowski).

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with a rich visual material (including exhibition’s installation shots) and essays by Suzanna Milevska, Mieke Bal, Dieter Roelstraete, Krystian Woznicki, Alain Badiou, Doreen Massey, Adam Budak, Kaja Pawelek, Agnieszka Kurant, Tomasz Majewski, Jaroslaw Lubiak.

Text courtesy of Adam Budak, curator. Images courtesy of Weronika Dobrowolska, Festival of Dialogues of Four Cultures and Monika Branicka.