KWIEKULIK. FORM IS A FACT OF SOCIETY

KWIEKULIK. FORM IS A FACT OF SOCIETY
an exhibition in Awangarda Gallery from 16 Dec. 2009 to 7 Feb. 2010




Action with a tube (detail), PDDiU, Warsaw 1975, photo by Przemysław Kwiek. From left to right: Urszula Kwiek, Zofia Kulik, Maksymilian Dobromierz Kwiek

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KwieKulik. Form is a fact of society
16 December 2009 – 7 February 2010

The exhibition presented at the BWA Awangarda Gallery in Wrocław is the first serious attempt to illuminate one of the most important artistic phenomena of post-war Polish art: the artistic duo Zofia Kulik and Przemysław Kwiek (KwieKulik) and their collective works from 1971 to 1987. KwieKulik’s work, which is radically unique in the history of the neo-avant-garde in Central Europe, is seen through a prism of their socio-political engagement and their uncompromising, bold criticism of their surrounding reality.

KwieKulik, the talented students of architect Oskar Hansen at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, were the first artists to conceive a radical political turn to Hansen’s theory of the Open Form. Since the beginning of the 1970s, KwieKulik pioneered the transformation of artistic practice into one of social experimentation, more laboratory than studio, creating artistic groups that promoted values and models of a non-authoritarian social system. As part of their agenda, KwieKulik sought to reconcile artistic praxis with everyday life. In a particularly merciless fashion, the duo fulminated against conformism, lack of ideals, cynicism, and hypocrisy: the ‘qualities’ that were the fundamental compound of community life in the People’s Republic of Poland.

The title of the exhibition, Form is a fact of society, refers to efforts towards reciprocal engagement with artistic discourse and forms of social organization, which are essential in KwieKulik’s practice. These efforts, when acknowledged today, trigger pertinent questions in a contemporary debate: What constitutes society? What forms determine its functioning? How can we use these forms to build a democratic community? Such an attitude towards KwieKulik’s work, twenty years after the political transformation in Poland, allows us to rethink our attitudes towards the socialist past. It permits us to draw a line between the undemocratic, repressive communist state and the emancipated dimension of the community-based, socialist ideals represented by KwieKulik. Furthermore, it creates means to reclaim these ideals and engage their contemporary critical potential.

This exhibition also highlights the couple’s innovatory and pioneering approach to film, photography, and multi-screen slide projection, which epitomize their unique variation of expanded cinema. It demonstrates the use of photography and video documentation of process-based, ephemeral actions and illustrates KwieKulik’s unconventional, avant-garde artistic strategies that combined scientific rigor with an openness for improvisation. Such as: ‘intuitive interactions’, ‘visual games’, ‘to-camera activities’, ‘parasite art’, ‘earn and create’, ‘art consciously bad’, etc.

Form is a fact of society is the result of a research project spanning a year and a half, initiated by the BWA in Wrocław with the objective of an in-depth multifaceted study of KwieKulik’s archives. The research project will culminate in the first monograph dedicated to KwieKulik, co-produced by BWA Wrocław, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw as well as Kontakt. The Art Collection of Erste Bank Group in Vienna and edited by Georg Schöllhammer and Łukasz Ronduda. The publication, planned for 2010, will be designed by Ludovic Balland and Błażej Pindor.

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Exhibition location
BWA Awangarda Gallery, Wita Stwosza 32, Wrocław, Poland

Opening hours
16 December 2009 – 7 February 2010
Tuesday to Sunday, 11:00 – 18:00

Opening
16 December 2009 at 19:00

Guided tour with the curators
16 December 2009 at 12:00
Registration necessary: info@bwa.wroc.pl

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Organizer
BWA Wrocław – Galleries of Contemporary Art
Director
Marek Puchała

Curators
Georg Schöllhammer, Łukasz Ronduda
Assistant curator
Maud Jacquin
Exhibition coordinator
Patrycja Sikora
Architectural consultation
Robert Rumas
Reading room
Natalia Sielewicz


Contact
BWA Wrocław - Galleries of Contemporary Art
www.bwa.wroc.pl
Wita Stwosza 32
50-149 Wrocław
Poland
T: +48 71 790 25 94,
F: +48 71 790 25 90
info@bwa.wroc.pl



FUNDED BY CITY OF WROCLAW AND THE POLISH MINISTRY OF CULTURE AND NATIONAL HERITAGE

Participation in contemporary art

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Participation in contemporary art

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Art Matters Foundation

www.artmattersfoundation.org/

The Social Critique: 1993-2005

The Social Critique: 1993-2005
12 Sep. - 22 Nov. 2009


Kalmar Konstmuseum
Stadsparken
39233 Kalmar
Sweden

http://www.kalmarkonstmuseum.se


Curator: Martin Schibli

The social critique 1993-2005 is a contemporary art historical exhibition aimed at giving an introduction and a structure to an important and eventful period in contemporary art. What is characteristic for social criticism is that it presupposes that in art there is a possibility to deal with, highlight and pose questions around social issues. To a large extent the social criticism grew out of the vacuum that the art of the early 1990's found itself in. A consequence of the fact that Postmodernism during the 1980's had dismantled Art from its pedestal, and won symbolic power in the world of art. Art had no longer any value in itself. At the same time the status of art was increasingly upheld by the hype that surrounded contemporary art during the economic boom of that decade. With the recession of the early 1990's the influx of capital into the art world ceased and this in turn led to the disappearance of hype. The art world imploded. In the early 1990´s this lead to a great sense of insecurity about where the contemporary art scene stood, and what was going to happen now, when so to speak everything was possible. Art was in need of a new identity, maybe even a new reason for its existence. The question asked was "What is the purpose of art, when its value as art no longer exists?"

That something had happened became obvious in 1993, at the Venice Biennale. With his Aperto-exhibition the curator Achille Bonito Oliva formulated a number of concurrent artistic positions that together gave a structure for where the contemporary art-scene was heading and what subjects it could deal with. It was in the social field that art had its function. Within the area of art there were a number of possibilities of focusing on various aspects of the social, within the large as well as the small. A few months earlier the Whitney Biennale also had received attention for dealing with political issues. It was within the social that art regained its purpose. The artist Rirkrit Tiravanija now became internationally recognised. Tiravanija had taken as his point of departure an idea pioneered by Joseph Beuys, the idea of the social sculpture, and for a number of years he was touring the art world with his cooking pieces that are based on the social function of art. In an exhibition at a department store ICA Malmborgs, Malmoe, the artist Elin Wikström spend the whole exhibition period on a bed, sometimes sleeping.

The exhibition at Kalmar Art Museum will consist of more than 25 works. Starting from a more humoristic standpoint, social criticism became increasingly hardcore and theoretically formulated and when moving into its end phase it shifted towards an aesthetisised form. The exhibition deals with subjects such as relational aesthetics, art research and post colonial theory. It is interesting to notice that the art of social criticism in reality grew out of the vacuum created from the last economic crash of the 1980's and that its strength diminished with the influx of capital into the art world during the last decade. Today the situation is partly the same as in the early 1990's and there is an uncertainty/openness about what is really happening on the contemporary art scene, combined with an economic downturn.

The contribution by Elin Wikström, Hur skulled det gå om alla gjorde så?, 1993, is taking place at the department store ICA Maxi Stormarknad, Verkstadsgatan 6, Kalmar, between 8-14 of October.

Participating artists: Franz Ackermann, Maja Bajevic, Richard Billingham, Angela Bulloch, Heath Bunting, Com&Com, Stefan Constantinescu, Plamen Dejanov & Swetlana Heger, Maria Eichhorn, Sylvie Fleury, Felix Gmelin, Johan Grimonprez, Jens Haaning, Swetlana Heger, Christine Hill, Sabine Hornig, Isaac Julien, Peter Land, Zbigniew Libera, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Rivane Neuenschwander and Cao Guimarães, Anneé Olofsson, Tanja Ostojic, Oliver Ressler, Pipilotti Rist, Annika Ström, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Elin Wikström and Zhang Huan


Official Opening: Saturday, 12th September, 2 PM



Zhang Huan »
"To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond", 1997, Performance, Beijing, China

Europe Now | Europe Next

Welcome to Europe Now | Europe Next. The website of the culturebase.net project was set up as an interactive space committed to the Europe of today and the Europe of tomorrow. Europe Now | Europe Next examines the process and effects of EU enlargement in the cultural field. At its heart is a series of live and online Encounters. Here artists, journalists and cultural operators open up debates, which are transcending national boundaries. You are invited to post your artistic works and join the debate.
more information...
http://www.europe.culturebase.net/

When artists collaborate - The Third Hand: Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism - Book Review

In The Third Hand: Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism, the Australian artist and critic Charles Green explores collaborative artistic practice with a focus on the late 1960s and early '70s. It's a timely topic since plural authorship continues full bore. Pragmatically, collaboration may facilitate projects of baffling complexity, such as the ephemeral installations of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, which would daunt a single author. It is also an essential critical tool for some artists, calling into question traditional notions like self-expression and subjectivity.

Green proposes to investigate joint work "through a very selective history of artistic collaborations after 1968--specifically those that involved unorthodox models of authorship." He conveys well the richness and variety of '70s art works linked to Conceptualism and reminds us that even recent art history was far more complicated than we may now remember. He makes impressive claims for collaboration, calling it "a crucial element from modernist to postmodern art" and asserting "the suddenly compelling relevance of alternative 1970s art practices to 1990s conceptualist agendas." In fact, though, Green doesn't do much to prove this part of his case, since he chiefly considers '70s Conceptualism, not '80s and '90s postmodernism. Instead he attempts to construct a new "model of authorship" that involves a "third artist," a phantom figure allegedly generated when artists set about working jointly; hence the book's title. Green is sensitive and acute on the intricacies of that not-me/not-you and the unexpected ways in which it can propel art works.

The author considers Joseph Kosuth; Ian Burn, Mel Ramsden and Art & Language; the Boyle Family; Anne and Patrick Poirier; Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison; Christo and Jeanne-Claude; Gilbert & George; and Ulay and Marina Abramovic. Some artists are covered in detail, others peremptorily or only inasmuch as they serve Green's agenda. His discussion of Gilbert & George treats 1969-73, the period of the Singing Sculpture; he ignores the ensuing 25 years of their consequential photographic work. Yet he follows several of his subjects into the late '80s. He strays widely from collaboration--examining issues of regionalism and recounting Australian culture skirmishes--and at moments the book reads like a compilation of previously published texts. His claim to a de-centered art history is undermined by his choice of artists, who, excepting the Poiriers, are anglophone or have shown in Australia. One regrets that Bernd and Hilla Becher only appear in an aside. The Bechers' collaboration predates those Green chose, and their influential work dwarfs many of the oeuvres he considers.

Green tends to be anecdotal rather than analytical when describing the concrete processes of collaborative work, and his writing seldom helps the reader "see" the pieces he discusses. He patronizes Donald Judd's criticism, calling it "hyperpedantic" and "highly moralistic." Yet in his early '60s reviews, Judd had the rare capacity to render precisely what he saw and to elucidate the relation between the making of a work and its meaning. Green could take a lesson.

The author seems more interested in couples, or nuclear families, than in collectives, which makes sense in terms of his "third artist" but tends to misrepresent the full range of collaborative practice. As a rule, collectives are shorter-lived than collaborating couples, but this doesn't reduce their appositeness to Green's study. Nevertheless, Green has the merit of addressing an issue often left aside by critical writing: the manner in which plural authorship opens up potentialities, affecting both art works and the ways we may read them.

The Third Hand begins with Joseph Kosuth's pieces "made around 1970, in relation to one type of artistic collaboration--the delegation of manufacture--because this delegation was crucial to the often-debated integrity of his early work and necessary to his defeat of painting." Although Kosuth involved others in the realization of his schemes, calling his projects "collaborations" is problematic: they are uniquely credited to his name, resemble his contemporaneous work and evidence his singular handling of language. And it's a kangaroo-sized leap to claim that, with his texts anonymously placed in Australian newspapers, Kosuth "had succeeded in producing a work that was not art." Despite Kosuth's extensive use of studio assistants for his large-scale installations, Green says little about employees, a gray area of collaboration. (Interestingly, many of Kosuth's former assistants are now themselves recognized artists.) Issues of delegation of manufacture go way back in Western art history, and dubbing Kosuth a precursor of collaborative art is a stretch.

The Third Hand: Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism, by Charles Green, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2001; 248 pages, $68.95 hardcover, $24.95 paper.


http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_11_90/ai_94079415/

ARQUIVO GLOBAL – PARTICIPATION

ARQUIVO GLOBAL – PARTICIPATION

A arte da participação
Qual é o significado de Arte Participativa, e porque havemos, nós artistas, de querer participar?

Arte participativa, é uma arte recente, evidenciada principalmente na efectivação de um tipo de arte contemporânea, mas também, no entendimento geral da história da arte, embora localizada numa arte que de alguma maneira tem um engajamento social e político. É também uma arte interventiva, alojando-se em comunidades, guiada por artistas que trabalham em grupos e com grupos, para uma interactividade comunitária, num campo que geralmente se revela ocupado por ambos.

A arte através dos seus principais causadores, os artistas, continua em permanente evolução, num constante desafio às suas próprias normas e às tradições mais consolidadas.

A arte colaborativa ou participativa é mais uma nova abordagem que se começa a desenhar no panorama artístico. Aqui a arte começa a ter uma utilização quase de serviço social, através de um tipo de activismo que se provoca, bastante visível, num contexto exterior ao dos meios museológicos, por exemplo, numa relação nitidamente em comunhão com a sociedade, que deverá ser entendida como uma viragem no panorama global da própria arte.

Estas novas praticas artísticas, no entanto, levantam uma série de questões, que interessa focar, principalmente: qual o papel do artista no contexto social e politico actual? A quem se destina afinal a arte que se produz? Que tipo de arte é que se produz? Ou ainda, que papel se deve atribuir à arte? O que é que a arte pode fazer, socialmente?

É chegada a altura de procurar para a arte colaborativa ou participativa novos modelos de enquadramento teóricos, práticos e de comunicação no contexto da arte contemporânea.

Não é difícil de fazer o enquadramento desta nova arte situada entre a pratica e a teoria, partindo de uma série de exemplos que já se centram nesta nova problemática, de arte engajada com a vida social e politica comum que rompe com o significado de fronteiras entre a arte e a vida onde ambas se confundem.

Existe actualmente uma nova critica da arte e uma série de teóricos que se debruçam há vários anos sobre estes novos temas, como Claire Bishop por exemplo, abrindo lugar a um debate sobre uma arte que se manifesta em espaços abertos, que convida a sociedade a sair do seu dia a dia e a criar estruturas comunitárias mesmo que temporárias, onde é abandonada a obrigatoriedade de a arte necessitar de um espaço como um museu ou uma galeria para que possa ser dada a conhecer. Podemos afirmar que a arte atingiu agora uma relação com a estética em que ambas deixaram de habitar diferentes espaços e passam a partilhar o mesmo, ou seja caminham lado a lado nesta nova problemática.

Rui Filipe Lopes - 09
(p 1)

PEDRO AZEVEDO - INTERVIEW

ANA CASTRO - INTERVIEW

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Vídeo referente ao trabalho da Ana Castro:


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Family Portraits_[InterculturalShots_ProjectByINCA]

Family interculturalism/multiculturalism are three terms that are still changing for us - still a work in progress.
five people from different cultural enviroments set on bench in St.Martins square and created seven families.
can we bring them toghether only when they're in front of the camera or wiull it last after stop recording?

This project has been funded by EU and European Youth Foundation.
Special thanks to Hardish Virk, Shaida/Ulfaharts, trevor, Young Discepols, Martin Watson, The Rainbow.

Partners Organizations:

INCA Italy
INCA Cataluna
INCA Germany
Puzzle (Portugal)
Bergsjöns Kultur & Mediaverkstad (Sweden)
Austeja and friends (Lithuania)

InterculturalShot

NOEMI FERREIRA - INTERVIEW

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Vídeo referente ao trabalho de Noemi Ferreira:


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This is my paradise_[InterculturalShots_ProjectByINCA]

How is relationships between the different communities in the street of birmingham?
what is the good and the bad thinghs with mixing different cultures? by interviews we have discovering " the truth" of the relation between communities, cultural mixture and the problems. what we also discovered is that the immigrants are somehow happy. they generally feel themselves like "home". some are afraid to the truth but some people are really honest. but at the end they are all living togheter.
...that is they paradise!!!

The project has been funded by EU and European Youth Foundation.
Special thanks to Hardish Virk, Shaida/Ulfaharts, trevor, Young Discepols, Martin Watson, The Rainbow.

Partners Organizations:

INCA Italy
INCA Cataluna
INCA Germany
Puzzle (Portugal)
Bergsjöns Kultur & Mediaverkstad (Sweden)
Austeja and friends (Lithuania)

Produced By INCA UK

InterculturalShot

ANA NOBRE - INTERVIEW

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Vídeo referente ao trabalho de Ana Nobre

PARTICIPATION

WORK IN PROGRESS

Rui Filipe Lopes