centrum

Our beloved collaborators, Centrum (The Center) art space has just appropriated a bizzare collection of, apparently extinct, dinosaurs. It includes also some humanoids and a giant squid. The Centre operates from a remote gardening plot in Szczecin, Poland.

annika eriksson in novosibirsk

The Site Residency has been initiated in 2013 on the island of Gotland, Sweden. Now the programme has begun its journey to conceptually linked locations in other countries or continents, chosen for their special features: oddness, remoteness, “exoticism”, seclusion, harshness, or unique architectural values. The Site Residency programme is a tribute to the artistic strategies from the 60s and 70s – an escape from rigid institutional structures and gallery/studio-based production – and all references to land- and conceptual art tactics are obvious and intentional. The program, is oriented towards “the secret world of doing nothing” and its consequences. It is structured to reduce the stimuli and thereby motivate a new artistic approach towards the place/work system – which is always an equation with two unknowns. The character of this residency specifically implies that the artist is to refrain from production – or at least attempt to live his or her artistic practice in a somewhat different way during the residency period.
The Berlin-based Swedish artist Annika Eriksson is the third artist-participant of The Site Residency (after Agnieszka Polska and Susanne Kriemann). Over the years, Eriksson has produced a number of works in which the perception of time, structures of power, and once acclaimed social visions are called into question. Strategically Eriksson plays with duration, repetition and looping revealing how this is subject to unexpected political appropriations and inversions.

we are all in this alone

And this is (probably) the final entry related to the 2015 edition of Venice Biennale. What you can see here is a selection of drawings which belong to the project at the Macedonian pavilion, by Hristina Ivanoska and Yane Calovski. The exhibition entitled We are all in this alone references a number of intricate sources: a fresco painting from the church of St. Gjorgi in Kurbinovo, painted by an unknown author in the 12th century, as well as writings by Simone Weil, Luce Irigaray, and personal notes by Paul Thek dating from the 1970s. 

herman de vries and lazaretto vecchio island

One of the surprises of the 56. Venice Biennale is an annex for the Dutch pavilion, hidden on the deserted and hardly accessible island called Lazaretto Vecchio. The exhibition at the Giardini pavilion and other places in the city and the island is dedicated to the oeuvre of herman de vries, the legendary land art veteran. de vries has scattered a number of stones with short texts over the island, where "this point is possible starting point, a possible standpoint, here is important, there is important, and so is everywhere". Lazaretto Vecchio was first inhibited in 1249, later used as a hospital for quarantined plague patients, and a leprosarium. This tiny place on the lagoon has faced a dark and surreal history, as a place of death rituals, mass graves, quarantine storage rooms, ruins and even dog sanctuary. 

venice 2015 part 2

Some more details from the extremely dense and down-to-earth 56th International Art Exhibition in Venice: Newell Harry, Bruce Nauman, Terry Adkins, Katharina Grosse, and herman de vries, 

venice 2015

Some wonders from the Venice Biennale 2015: Dahn Vo (undoubtedly the most perfectly displayed set of works this year), Adrian Piper, Ellen Gallagher (the artist being interviewed in front of her work), Marlene Dumas, Christodolus Panayiotou (one of the most sophisticated exhibitions at the biennale), and Joan Jonas. 

art wastelands

The text below is an excerpt from Five Institutional Tales of Plants, Fungi and Gardening published in the new book by Elżbieta Jabłońska, summarizing her social gardening project ART WASTELANDS.

the estate

Majątek (The Estate) is in-depth anthology of texts on dramatic events in the 20th c., Central and Eastern Europe - "plundered manor houses of the nobility, art collections which have either been completely lost or dispersed, palaces turned into schools or museums, entire social classes destroyed" - which accompanies a gorgeous exhibition at Królikarnia, National Museum in Warsaw. The book includes a set of texts on art, war, law and economy by such authors as Jan Sowa and Svetalana Boym, and photographic essay by Krzysztof Pijarski. 

sociological record's archive

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. 

kino-sztuka

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.