Celebrating the Earth Day with Zofia Rydet's archive... The artists's monumental cycle Sociological Record was created in the years 1978 - 1997, Rydet began working on the cycle when she was already 67 years old. The idea came to her during an accidental visit in a car manufacturing plant in Jelcz. She was fascinated by the view of identical small working spaces that the employees decorated with cut-outs from newspapers, photographs of their families, religious pictures, erotic posters, landscapes, etc. Convinced that objects and images gathered in private spaces defined people and “revealed their psychology”, Rydet decided to pursue the mission of documenting the interiors of Polish houses. Sociological Record comprises nearly 30 thousand negatives made in more than 100 Polish villages. The artist strived to remain faithful to the method she adopted: the inhabitants of each house always look straight into the camera, they are portrayed with a wide-angle lens, with flash, against a wall. Nevertheless, the archive include hundreds of bizzare photographs which don't follow the strict rules of the project, like the ones depicted here.
More images from this vast repository of images might be browsed here. The archive will be shown at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw this Septmeber.
Believe it or not, a new artistic turn has been just born. Or it was just nicknamed: kino-sztuka. You can also call it the cinematographic turn in visual arts. It seems to be a Polish phenomenon (even though it's not quite an endemic one), quite a few contemporary artists here aim at inflitrating the film industry, they kidnap the format of a feature movie and dream of reaching the broad non-artistic audience. At the same time, they try to shake the foundations of the craft, breaking the narrative and experimenting with the image, sound and textual layers of the film. See the first Polish western movie Summer Love by Piotr Uklański or one of the features by Anna and Wilhelm Sasnal to get the spirit of the movement.
As the book was co-written by Łukasz Ronduda (with Jakub Majmurek) - a curator and writer who specialises at ephemeral and fake art movements, experimental exhibition formats and evasive, mythical figures from the heyday of concept art - so one might question if such a thing as kino-sztuka is real. Nevertheless, the evidence material gathered in the book is quite convincing - film scripts, essays, scenarios, interviews, production shots etc. My only concern is that most of those films remain in their embryonic state. All in all, the future will bring some new features by Zbigniew Libera, Agnieszka Polska, Norman Leto and several others and then we will check if the beast is alive and can be a real challenge for the Polish film industry.
And yes, sadly the book is available only in Polish.
The fourth issue of enigmatic art magazine Format P (2011) was dedicated to fiction writing as a form of exhibition making and art criticism. Sadly it was sold out more than two years ago, with very few copies circulating among the dedicated readers. Finally it came back, the whole issue is now available online here. The magazine was delivered with the participation of great writers, artists and curators: Sina Najafi, Dieter Roelstraete, Antje Majewski, Raqs Media Collective, Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, Ingo Niermann, Aaron Schuster, and many others. It includes science fiction stories, poems, fairytales for adults, romances, fabricates interviews etc. All the confabulations and gossips are gathered in a book exhibition of merely 13 x 17 cm.
