In a rearview mirror
I suddenly saw
the mass of the cathedral in Beauvais;
large things inhabit small, briefly.
– Adam Zagajewski
"Rearview Mirror" from Going to Lwow, 1985; translated by Marysia Pilatowicz
Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, one might expect great changes in the cultural practices in the region known as the Eastern Bloc, even though the political cultures and histories of the various nations that comprise it greatly diverge. "Rearview Mirror" explores the cultural aftershocks of the Soviet era across Eastern Europe. The exhibition brings together artists from these diverse backgrounds and histories, who engage with post-conceptual strategies and forms, and artistic practices that range in media from video, installation and performance to sculpture and painting. Looking both to the past and to the future, the work of these 22 artists represent 11 different countries and collectively challenge accepted notions of Eastern Europe as a social, political and art historical monolith.
Curated by Christopher Eamon, a Canadian-born, New York-based independent curator who has curated numerous international exhibitions and edited and written for a wide number of publications. The exhibition is said to be somewhat monochrome. The overriding colour and texture of "Rearview Mirror" is reminiscent of a concrete empty area, flat, lacking vitality, and slathered in cement grey open space. Could this be a reflection on the grimness of Soviet empire which specialised in brutalist, cement and steel infrastructures.
The exhibition does not attempt to be all-inclusive or encyclopaedic; instead it is a preliminary investigation in which one can find moments of dialogue, convergence as well as difference. It is a unique opportunity to view art works by a new generation of artists, such as Cyprian Muresan, Gintaras Dzidziapetris and Anna Molska in the context of some of their contemporaries who are already well-established in the international art world: Paweł Althamer, Roman Ondák and Wilhelm Sasnal.
Participating artists:
Paweł Althamer (Poland), Anetta Mona Chişa (Romania/Czech Republic) with Lucia Tkáčová (Slovakia), Gintaras Didžiapetris (Lithuania), Dušica Dražić, (Serbia), Igor Eškinja (Croatia), Johnson & Johnson (Estonia), Anna Kołodziejska (Poland), David Maljković (Croatia), Ján Mančuška (Czech Republic), Dénes Miklósi (Romania), Alex Mirutziu (Romania), Anna Molska (Poland), Ivan Moudov (Bulgaria), Ciprian Mureşan (Romania), Deimantas Narkevičius (Lithuania), Roman Ondák (Slovakia), Anna Ostoya (Poland), Taras Polataiko (Ukraine), Wilhelm Sasnal (Poland), Sislej Xhafa (Kosova), Katarina Zdjelar (Serbia).
Wilhelm Sasnal's paintings and drawings often project a decidedly cinematic character that recalls film stills or individual frames of a cartoon. His "Untitled (Elvis)" (2007) work is filmed in grainy 16 mm, complete with a whirring projector, the opening sequence of the film shows a laptop spinning around a microphone while a YouTube video of an early performance by Elvis plays on it (the scene looks a lot like one of Sasnal's paintings). The artist's emphasis on framing bits of action or non-action provokes the feeling that the viewer is often peering into one of his works as though it were a television monitor, with all the clarity that implies. Though these aspects of Sasnal's work point to the photographic source material that he often relies on, it's unsurprising that he has finally undertaken a feature film of his own. That film, S´winiopas (Swineherd, 2008), an elliptical rendering of the perverse Hans Christian Andersen fable "The Swineherd" (1842), along with a recent series of related paintings and drawings, comprised Sasnal's show.
A screening of Sasnal's film "Swineherd" takes place on the 7th of February 2012 at 19:00 at the Garneau Theatre, 8712 109 Street, Edmonton.
Paweł Althamer's sculptures, videos, and performances explore the fragility and contingency of the body - often his own - within the wider sphere of social and political contexts. The motif of dog life appears in "Guma" (2009), a sculpture that memorialises a disappeared town drunk in rubber, or guma in Polish, which was also the individual's nickname.
Anna Ostoya is a New York-based artist whose multimedia practice includes collage, painting, sculpture, and sound. Interested in themes of idealism and utopia, she draws on art history, theory and literature, using text as the primary inspiration for her practice. In "Work by an Artist Inspired by a Theory about Modernity" (2007), Ostoya places an ordinary plastic bag, blown constantly by a small fan, on a sculptural pedestal, creating an obvious anti-monument. In "Saturday Afternoon, 1st of December, Leeds" (2007-8), she props up a triangular table top with antique columns, and paints it all a dull beige, including the battered-looking CD player that plays a recording of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman reading from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities.
Anna Kolodziejska's work is almost purely formal, providing an interesting counterpoint. Employing clothing to give eerie, incongruous qualities to inanimate objects, Kolodziejska - a punny minimalist - seems to exist entirely outside nationality. Hers is, unmistakably, the charged, internationally present milieu of the contemporary gallery: the place where, in large part, all of these diverse and multiply skilled artists make their home.
Anna Molska's video projection, "Peers" (2010), teeters on the edge of parody. She swings languidly in a hammock, breasts exposed, surrounded by budgies, and utters an occasional flat profundity. The artist's video works are filmed performances. She invites ordinary people, instead of professional actors, to be protagonists, thus allowing for an authenticity, uncertainty even, and natural spontaneity that is an integral part of the work. She reconsiders revolutionary thought's power to cause social change through investigations of avant-garde visual and political idioms.
"Rearview Mirror" is on view from the 27th of January - the 29th of April 2012 Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton.
The exhibition is a co-presentation with the Art Gallery of Alberta and will be accompanied by a substantial publication with commissioned texts, co-published by The Power Plant and Art Gallery of Alberta.
Art Gallery of Alberta
2 Sir Winston Churchill Square
Edmonton, Alberta , Canada T5J 2C1
Telephone: 780.422.6223 Fax: 780.426.3105
Email: info@youraga.ca
www.youraga.ca
Source: www.youraga.ca
Also see:
Polish Artists at the "Rearview Mirror" in Toronto