Aleksandra Chciuk & Kuba Krzewiński | Black of Granule - trailer
In recent years, Aleksandra Chciuk has been inviting audiences to an immersive, intimate and sensual experience, at the same time inspiring them both with her memories and with the existing environment (Splot-Maszyna at the Central Museum of Textiles). The audio layer of Międzydźwięki (Intersounds) consisted of ‘murmurs, whispers and sounds’ from the old building of the Reicher Synagogue, processed using electronics and played on the objects; the viewers wandered the interiors in complete darkness, and at one point the artist whispered a single word into their ears.
Similar intimacy can be found in the ‘installation for a single listener’ – Black of Granule, the description of which is quoted above and which has been successfully presented in several cities. In the film Chamber of Nature, Chciuk recreates her childhood experience as she walked from the hustle and bustle of the street through the gate to a music school filled with the sounds of rehearsal. A similar conceptual approach to sound can be found in her film titled Incorporate, created for Kuba Krzewiński’s piece, in which she blurs the border between the instrument, body and memory with the use of disturbing surrealistic images. Most of her video works are recordings or edits of live performances, similarly to how visual works can be treated audibly – this intermediality is one of the main characteristics of Aleksandra Chciuk’s activity as an artist.
The key to the sonic sculpting of space is, in the case of Uni-partytury, interactivity, i.e., the presence and action of the audience. At this point, Chciuk’s latest works develop her earlier explorations at the intersection between composition (both visual and musical) and performance. An important trend in Chciuk’s work are performances, created with a camera in mind, mediating between sound and visual illusions (video works included in the Koniec z Błotem series – Harmonia, Archeopteryx, Mrówkojad) and between the carnality of image and musical performance (Variation On Black, 2014). Now we’re dealing with a similar tension – it’s the body that runs the sound that widens the image. […] These works problematise the gallery experience itself, interestingly resonating with the contemporary narrative and dramatic turn in thinking about the exhibition. The projects by SzpilMuzik introduce tension between the perception of ‘gallery’ and ‘concert’.
(Antoni Michnik, text accompanying the exhibition of Uni-partytury at the Signum Gallery in Łódź, 2019)
In an interview by Marta Ostajewska for Powidoki (3/2020), Aleksandra Chciuk confesses:
Then I became aware that the partiture-instrument should be an instrument on which no longer the musician, but any listener can play and, in that way, compose their own unistic piece, deciding in which moment it should start and in which it should end. Through movement, the listener brings micro-organisms to life and engages in dialogue with them. Sound is their breath. The composed sounds of Grajobraz are first and foremost derivates of sounds connected to the forest, as seen in, for example, Nawoływanie z lasu [Call from the Forest]. They are also mechanical and digital sounds, crackles, hums, beeps, as if straight from a digital jungle recorded on a very big gramophone record on which bugs crawl – transistors, capacitors and other integrated circuits, frozen in the form of fossils – pictorial formalin.
