Paweł Althamer, photo: Jerzy Dudek / Fotorzepa / Forum
Poland’s biggest music festival hosts the second installment of a project presenting contemporary art
The fact that the Heineken Open’er Festival brings not only the best music but also the best in theatre and art was already evident at last year’s edition. The premiere of the Open’er Gallery took place at one of the huge air sheds of the Babie Doły airport, the grounds of the festival’s stage. The new space was then taken up by the Museum of Modern Art (Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej) in Warsaw, which presened a selection of video works and pieces inspired by music. The Gallery’s activity was inaugurated with the installation of a colourful 12-metre obelisk, Maurycy Gomulicki’s Totem, inspired by the idea of axis mundi. The artist said that “For the thousands of people that come here and wait for the concerts of their beloved bands, the Open’er is a central point”.
This extraordinary monument to joy and fun marks the beginning of a cooperation between the organiser of the festival, the Alter Art agency, and Poland’s most imporant artists. For the 12th edition of the festival, the agency has invited Paweł Althamer and the Nowolipie group. Althamer - one of the most recognised contemporary artists, a sculptor and director of video works and of various ethereal situations - has been conducting workshops with groups of ailing people, mostly those suffering from MS, for over a dozen years. The workshops take place in Warsaw at the State Art Club of Muranów (Państwowe Ognisko Artystyczne na Muranowie). Weekly pottery classes are not only a way of learning to mold clay, but are also a form of rehabilitation.
Althamer and the Nowolipie Group (members connected to the Muranów activities) have already made several exhibitions together. The organisers inform us that that as part of the Open’er festival, a work will be created on a grand scale, and all festivalgoers will be invited to participate in finishing it.
One of the festival nights will also feature a continuation of Althamer’s performance-art piece Pramień Sonca / Sun Ray, which took place in Minsk, Belarus, in 2012. More than 150 people, dressed in golden uniforms in order to greet the sun, marched through the streets of capital city - where the encounter of a few friends in the street can be considered an illegal gathering, where people were sentenced to several years in prison for clapping in public and where the authorities want to control absolutely everything. The dwellers of Minsk broke their fear and came out into the streets to meet hope for a better tommorow. The Open'er festival in Gdynia plans a special concert and a night march towards a rising sun, open for participation (with a reservation).
The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw is also this year’s host of the Open’er Gallery. Instead of an exhibition, an “agitating projection machine” will park in the former hangar, and will screen experimental film works by Polish artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. The form of the vehicle is evocative of revolutionary flying machines of the past century, straight out of science-fiction. The gigantic screens will be showing films selected from Filmoteka, the museum's online film archive.
The museum also invites participation in its excursion programme, Gdynia w budowie / Gdynia under Construction. It borrows its title and idea from a festival organised by the museum in the capital, Warszawa w budowie. Participants in the walks will be acquainted with 15 examples of architecture of the interwar period. Boldmagazinee.pl comments that this is the ideal way of looking at Gdynia - the only city in Poland to be founded as a modernist design project.
Heineken Open’er Festival
Organiser: Alter Art
Gdynia, Babie Doły / Kosakowo airport
3rd – 6th of July, 2013
Author: Agnieszka Sural, translated by Paulina Schlosser
Source: Heineken Open’er Festival, Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej in Warsaw, boldmagazine.pl, own material. 24.06.2013