The three key elements of the exhibit are: All That Music! - 6 simultaneous video projections that show teenagers playing music, filmed as they practice at home, in their rooms, among their private belongings. Dreaming of Speed and Adventure - a group of space installations and sculptures. And Majka From the Movie - video-installation based on the 70s TV series Szaleństwo Majki Skowron / Madness of Majka Skowron. The first seven out of the fifteen planned episodes of the artistic series Majka From the Movie are presented at Łaźnia.
The presentation is also accompanied by a series of photographs Heroines and Heroes, video Próba / The Trial, objects from the TV series Pasigraphy - Democratic Sculpture and Galaktyka / Galaxy, and the installations Cisza / Silence and Cicha rozmowa / Quiet Conversation.
Zuzanna Janin utilising the contemporary means of expression reaches into the deep human emotion, unearths the intimate space, evokes confessions. The memories and impressions from childhood, existing in the present as a collection of angst and exhilaration shown against the emotional world of an adult, where thoughts of the passing time gain importance. The artists ponders upon culture, music that becomes a way to escape and survive, preserving the child-like sensitivity, the need to create as a way of finding one's way.
The artist says about her projects Dreaming of Speed and Adventure, All That Music! and Majka From the Movie:
For some time I was making these pieces about the future, to the point of experiencing the impossible in 'Widziałam swoją śmierć' / 'I Saw My Own Death', where I tried to visualise the knowledge of the human being, about the future that you cannot see, and I made a full circle and went back to analysing the past, childhood, early youth, to be able to say something about this period from a perspective. In these series of works, an installation came to be - the memories of childhood and youth's dreams and games, spelled out by plastic toy cars: 'Dreaming of Speed and Adventure'. (...)
In 'All That Music!' the protagonist is a young boy, a young musician. It is completely differently constructed: these are static frames that last from 5 to 15 minutes, that simultaneously show 6 boys practicing instruments and singing at home. There is an electric and bass guitar, vocals, drums, piano and a classic guitar. The boys are shot in their rooms, their messy "caves", with posters of their favorite musicians on the walls. This is where the entire privacy and vulnerability of a teenager is hidden. The rooms are where the world of dreams is created. (...) This work is about passion and how culture saves people. Especially during adolescence - a dangerous period in life. (...)
(...)The Majka piece is about roaming and looking for something. Life is roaming. And especially youth is this roaming of oneself. During her journey Majka, a cult, rebel character who "escapes" from the frame of the original TV show and begins to wander across the area of culture (as she escaped the prison of communism). She appears in places she neither has ever been nor she could even be before. For example, she couldn't have met Colonel Kurtz / Marlon Brando in Vietnamese forests. Now she is there and witnesses his death. She was not on the desert in Zabriskie Point, where a girl - the film's protagonist - wandered with her boyfriend and where she blew up a villa she regarded as a symbol of capitalism and its values. Now Majka is that girl and it is she who blows the house up. I filmed a lot of additional footage, in which an actress' daughter played. She acts Majka in the additional footage I needed, but Majka in fact wanders all over the world as I filmed it in Tokyo, in Miami, in London, anywhere.
This gives me a dual character, Majka from 1975 / Majka from 2009 is the one heroine, at the same time meeting various people, identifying herself with some of them - as she does with the girl in Zabriskie Point. Other times she remains indifferent, as when she falls asleep and misses all the final scenes of Uma Thurman fighting in Kill Bill. Then, on the contrary, in fragments of Rybczyński's Tango she becomes one of the key figures. And she goes on again and meets Ripley from Alien. As they both watch what the science fiction culture created over time, Majka unexpectedly finds herself in Tarkovsky's Solaris. Later on she meets Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone's feature film The Doors. All these adventures are divided into episodes, six of them so far. In one, entitled The Way, she's on the run all of the time: fleeing across Tokyo, forests, jungle, until she ends up at the Warsaw Central Station, meets Žižek and asks him who she should meet in her journey through the land of culture. "Look not for people", he answers. "Instead, look for what they do. These are miracles". Thanking him, she goes on. This is all very symbolic. (…)
(...) We initially wanted to make the whole series with Tomek Kozak but he ultimately made one trailer, and I made six episodes. The work is in progress, there will be more to come, with a different premise. Each of the episodes ends with a sentence: 'to be continued...'. (Fragments from an interview "Dancing with Marlonem B." by Kamila Wielebska, published in the exhibit's catalogue)
Curator: Anna Szynwelska.
Opening: January 20, 2011 at 18:00.
The exhibition runs till March 2, 2011.
Centre for Contemporary Art Łaźnia
ul. Jaskółcza 1, 80-767 Gdańsk
Director: Jadwiga Charzyńska
tel. (+48 58) 320 29 76, 305 40 50
fax (+48 58) 305 26 80
link*www.laznia.pl*http://www.laznia.pl****Source: press release, www.lokal30.pl