Transfert
Istituto Polacco di Roma, Rome, Italy
Wojciech Pus, Instant (2008)
‘It’s all borrowed shadiness, fibreglass, paper,’ rants Nails - the protagonist of writer Dorota Maslowska’s Snow White and Russian Red (2002) - ‘the whole cottonball of the world.’ A controversial portrait of despondent young Poland, Maslowska’s novel caricatures contemporary Polish identity in an absurdist portrayal of the fatalism and paranoia of what philosopher Boris Groy calls the ‘post-communist condition’. But what is the ‘post-communist condition’ and what is ‘Polishness’? The Istituto Polacco di Roma confronts these questions in its most recent project, ‘Transfert’, a series of six exhibitions that surveys Poland’s most significant museums and galleries – Raster, Ujazdowski Castle, Zacheta, and Galeria Foksal in Warsaw, Bunkier Sztuki in Krakow, and Galeria Entropia in Breslavia.
In Moje video-masochizmy (My Video Masochisms, 1986), exhibited at ‘Bunker d’Arte’, the first instalment of ‘Transfert’, Jozef Robakowski tugs desperately at his cheeks with salad prongs, his face like a gummy mask that he is wrestling to remove. Under the unrelenting gaze of the video camera, the artist pinches his cheeks with clothes pins and hammers his head with a mallet, employing all available household tools in an intimate game of tug-of-war with himself.
In a nearby projection, young Egyptian artist Wael Shawky walks the aisles of Krakow’s Jesuit church, reading passages from the Koran that refer to Jesus: ‘Remember when Allah said, ‘O Jesus! I will cause thee to die, and will take thee up to myself and deliver thee from those who believe not.’’ As if to underscore the mission of Krakow’s Bunkier Sztuki, Shawky’s chanting, in Digital Church (2005), plays under Robakowski’s murmurs and cries of ‘closer’ and ‘farther’, which both order and mimic the movements of the camera’s zooming in and out in Bitlej-dalej (Closer-Farther, 1984).
Robakowski’s pioneering oeuvre spans an impressive 45 years and his presence in Bunkier’s collection is testament to the institution’s status in Poland. Bunkier’s initiatives, however, do not just aim at conserving Polish art historical memory but hope to stimulate dialogue between the emerging and the established, the local and the international, the young and the old. Previous exhibitions like ‘Miroslaw Balka, Alfredo Pirri, Beyond’ (2007), which compared and contrasted the approaches of two artists from the same generation but different sociocultural backgrounds, and the project ‘Transkultura’ (Transculture, 2006-7), which ended in an international conference of scientists and artists on the topic of identity politics and globalization, demonstrate the sincerity of Bunkier’s intent to foster exchange and foment discussion. Likewise, the ‘Bunker d’Arte’ exhibition achieves the same transversal effect, criss-crossing references in curious juxtapositions that leave the visitor wondering what influence Marek Sobczyk (of Poland’s well-known ‘outsider’ art collective Gruppa) might have had, if any, on the acclaimed Polish painter Wilhelm Sasnal.
For Robakowski, the video camera is an extension of the body: the artist explores its potential like a baby charting its boundaries and learning its landscapes by sticking his fingers in his nostrils or trying to fit his foot in his mouth. Similarly, through paintings like Plasia Kolumna – tryptyk (Bird Column – triptych, 2005), Piotr Lutynski breaks down the ideological barriers between nature and culture providing a forum where their symbolic representations, animals and galleries, meet in a free exchange. Lutynski’s animals don’t replace the art work, as they do in the work of Janis Kounellis, nor are they potential viewers, as was the case with Joseph Beuys’ dead hare. They are, instead, more reminiscent of the rabbit in John Bock’s Gast (2004), oblivious to the aura of the exhibition space as they wander among the troughs and hay the artist has provided to further encourage their indifference to the social mores of the environment surrounding them. In his flat, iconic rendering of Pepo Geniusz (Pepo the Genius, 1994), Marek Sobczyk’s oil on canvas makes ironic reference to the ‘war of the walls’ when Poland was under martial law. During this period, the only free spaces for debate were fences and walls, covered in slogans at night only to be painted over by authorities the day after.
Though transformed into Krakow’s centre for contemporary art in the mid-1990s, Bunkier Sztuki has been a municipal institution since the 1950s. Galeria Entropia, on the other hand, a publicly-funded but privately-run exhibition space in Breslavia, was founded in 1988 and follows the shifting tendencies of emerging artists. ‘Entropia’, the second exhibition of the ‘Transfert’ project, was inaugurated with a performance by sound artist Dawid Szczesny and features a selection of young artists represented by the gallery.
‘I understand everything […] I don’t exist, you don’t exist, we don’t exist, that’s already settled.’ Like Maslowska’s protagonist, Wojciech Gilewicz renders disaffection tragicomic in Aporia Malarstwa (The Aporia of Painting, 2006-07), in which reality is literally indistinguishable from its double, the simulacrum – or, in this case, the painting. Gilewicz paints unassuming urban niches, panels and thresholds from life and then covers the original sources with their painted likenesses.
In its first two episodes, ‘Transfert’ dissuades us from exoticizing ‘Polishness’ while encouraging a poetic reading of the ‘post-communist condition’ as an allegory for sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s ‘liquidity’, that state of being, defining contemporary existence, in which the only stable point of reference is the swift-footed ephemeral. Instant (2008), a new video work previewed in Rome before its inauguration at Galeria Entropia, is artist Wojciech Pus’s visionary account of Bauman’s ‘liquid modernity’: a hypnotic panorama of the still and the fleeting, the patient waiting and the alert capturing behind each lived moment.
‘Raster: The Artist Relinquished 2’ opens on April 8. ‘Cement Legacy’, a selection of works from an exhibition of the same title held at Warsaw’s Ujazdowski Castle in 2006, opens on May 12.
Emily Verla Bovino
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