Poland’s oldest international festival of performance art expands into a special four-day Canadian edition, hosted by Le Lieu centre for contemporary art. The INTERAKCJE programme is curated by Artur Tajber and pays tribute to the oeuvre of Jan Świdziński
The INTERAKCJE Festival of the Art of Actionism's 15th edition is entitled Fais où tu es, pratiques contextuelles entre la Pologne et le Québec / Do It Where You Are - Contextual practices between Poland and Quebec, and takes on the form of a bi-continental happening in Kraków and Piotrków Trybunalski in Poland and Quebec City in Canada.
The festival presents works by Polish and Canadian artists of the young and older generations. They all draw inspiration from Jan Świdziński's abundant body of creative and theoretical work, celebrating the artist's 90th birthday this year. Świdziński (born 1923) was the first to forge the concept of Contextualism, arguing for an artistic form in which context was the agent determining whether something constitutes a form of artistic expression. Swidziński said that:
For the act of drinking a glass of water to become art, it has to be performed in the right place, at the right time, and in the right company.
Under Artur Tajber’s curatorship, the festival programme underscores different interpretations behind contextual art as it is practised in very different cultural environments.
The path leading Świdziński to his theoretical analysis of art began with his research into various traditional forms, such as dance, architecture and painting. He joined the ballet school during the war, and studied architecture at the same time. After the war he continued his architectural studies on an irregular basis until 1970. His work has always been concerned with communication, semiotics and the dissemination of information. This interrogation determined his choice of performance as the most satisfying form of artistic expression.
Świdziński graduated from the Department of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 1952, and by 1962 he had created a series of paintings called Znaki semantyczne / Semantic Signs. His solo painting exhibition in 1965 put an end to his career as a painter, for he discovered that painting and other traditional art forms were unable to confront the fundamental, existential dilemmas faced by contemporary man.
Swidzinski fully turned to performance art by the mid-1970s. In his manifesto Art as Contextual Art (Lund, 1976), he claimed he was "interested in the art that operates within the sphere of meanings, not the art that creates objects." The manifesto was first presented in 1976 at the Galerie St. Petri in Lund, Sweden, an important venue closely associated with performance and conceptual artists including Nam June Paik and Yoko Ono.
The INTERAKCJE festival is organized in collaboration with Le Lieu - centre en art actuel, in Quebec City, which first published Swidzinski's dissertation on his theory, L'Art et son Contexte, in 2005. He first visited Canada in 1976, when he took part in the contextual art conference at the Centre for Experimental Art and Communication (CEAC) in Toronto. He also spent time teaching at the University of Calgary and University of British Columbia in Vancouver, incubating a generation of new performance artists.
The four-day exchange of artistic initiatives between Poland and Quebec takes place in Quebec City beginning on the 4th of April with a conference on performance art at Universite Laval. Events that follow include performances and actions from the following Polish artists:
Janusz Bałdyga is the co-founder of Pracownia Dziekanka, the iconic avant-garde gallery in Warsaw of the 1980s. He is also a member of the avant-garde theatre group Akademia Ruchu
Przemysław Branas is an experimental performance artist who investigates the tensions between the boundaries of the body, culture and social structures
Artur Arti Grabowski is a prominent representative of the emerging generation of performance artists in Poland, who tackles socially pertinent issues with criticism and humor
Łukasz Szalankiewicz, aka ZENIAL, is a sound designer and avant-garde musician, known to U.S. audiences for his performance at the 2010 UNSOUND festival in New York City
Artur Tajber, the curator of the festival also presents his work, which examines the idea of time.
In addition to performance art presentations, the festival audiences in Quebec can also view a screening of Barbara Maron's documentary on Polish Actionism. Maron focuses on the young emerging generation of Polish performance artists as well as the two pioneers of contextualism - Jan Swidziński, and Jerzy Bereś (1930-2012), one of the forerunners of Polish performance art.
In May 2013 a group of Canadian artists is scheduled to present an analogous programme of events at the MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Kraków and Ośrodek Działań Artystycznych (O.D.A.) in Piotrków Trybunalski as part of the second installment of the 15th INTERAKCJE festival.
The 15th International Festival of the Art of Actionism INTERAKCJE is organised by the Ośrodek Działań Artystycznych (ODA) Centre for Artistic Activities in Piotrków Trybunalski, in collaboration with Le Lieu - centre en art actuel, Quebec City, the Intermedia Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Kraków (MOCAK), Espace Virtuel, Sequence, Centre d'Art Contemporain and it is supported by the Polish Cultural Institute New York.
Festival programme:
- Thursday, 4th of April, 12 pm
Conference Fais où tu es: Pratiques contextuelles entre la Pologne et le Québec
Universite Laval
Café Caféine, 295 Blvd Charest Est
Québec, Canada
- Friday-Saturday, 5th and 6th of April, 8 pm
An evening of performances and actions by Janusz Baldyga, Przemyslaw Branas, Artur Grabowski, Lukasz Szalankiewicz and Artur Tajber. Video projections of Barbara Maron’s film on Polish Actionism
Le Lieu, centre en art actuel
345 rue du Pont,
Québec, Canada
- Sunday the 7th of April, 1 pm
Conference on the ideas of Contextualism in Poland along with presentations by Janusz Baldyga, Przemyslaw Branas, Artur Grabowski, Lukasz Szalankiewicz and Artur Tajber. Followed by a discussion.
Le Lieu, centre en art actuel
345 rue du Pont
Québec, Canada
Paulina Schlosser, source: http://www.polishculture-nyc.org, 3.04.2013