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.