Waldemar Tatarczuk in Corpus, photo: Maciej Kaczanowski
Waldemar Tatarczuk represents Poland at Tel Aviv’s annual ZAZ festival of performance art. Bringing together various forms of expression from across the globe, the event is a unique blend of highly responsive and politically engaged pieces of our times
Work that is presented at ZAZ is always grounded on live and direct actions from an international roster of artists. The pieces they show at the event offer differently orchestrated yet immediate responses to the reality in which they live. The festival is organized by the Shelter 209 Foundation in memory of Dan Zakhem, an artist particularly renowned for his input in the advancement of interdisciplinary arts in Israel. The Shelter 209 Foundation and the ZAZ festival are managed by the well-known performance artist Tamar Raban.
Born in 1964 in the Polish town of Siemiatycze, Waldemar Tatarczuk lives and works in Lublin, Poland. He is a performance and installation artist, and an art curator. Tatarczuk was the founder and curator of Lublin’s Performance Art Centre (1999-2010), and since 2012 he runs the Labyrinth Gallery in Lublin. He has been active as a performance artist since 1988, performing internationally throughout Europe and Asia. His curatorial projects include: 'Art Kontakt' Performance Art Festival (Lublin), European Performance Art Festival EPAF (Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, Poland), Performance Arsenal (Arsenal Gallery Bialystok, Poland), 'Open City' Festival of Art in Public Spaces (Lublin, Poland), and Performance Art Days (Kiev and Lviv, Ukraine).
Waldemar Tatarczuk reveals in an artist’s statement:
The essential substance of my performance is memory. Memory as a phenomenon as well as memory embedded in material objects, traces, that which remains. Memory that refers to the past while contradicting the future. The question about a trace that remains, about where it actually is, refers to what is left after every event. It also refers to memory and how it evolves, how memories become deformed and blurred, replaced by other, more vivid ones.
Around 30 artists both from Israel and abroad participate in this year’s edition of the festival, with an interesting diversity of guests from different cultures, employing varied forms of expression. The Polish Waldemar Tatarczuk stages his work alongside performance artists who travel to Tel Aviv from Switzerland, Nepal, Hong Kong, Mexico, India, and Ukraine.
The broad spectrum of the various artistic forms ranges from small performance pieces to ongoing performances which can last even throughout the entire duration of the festival. Some pieces include interaction with the audience and others are showcases. Some are complex multidisciplinary endevours and others entail very simple and minimalist conceptual gestures. Yet, all of the pieces are based on the artist’s physical presence, and it always this presence that moves and advances the piece.
For more information about the 2012 edition of the ZAZ festival, see: www.miklat209.org.il
For information about Waldmar Tatarczuk’s work, see: http://waldemartatarczuk.blogspot.com
The artist's participation in the festival is supported by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute
Editor: SRS
Source: www.polishinstitute.org.il, http://waldemartatarczuk.blogspot.com, www.mobius.org