Event date
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Podsumowanie
The "supergroup" so heavily mired in irony and self-derision has announced their final attempt at sharing their unconventional artistic vision with the world. The exhibition provides a comprehensive and critical survey of the group's work over the past decade, while shedding light on its ultimate collapse...
Content
Azorro's Oskar Dawicki, Igor Krenz, Wojciech Niedzielko and Łukasz Skąpski made their first video in 2001 in Warsaw, calling it We Really Like It. This was around the time when themes of critical art and the artistic process of Dorota Nieznalska, who combined a duality of contexts to create a commentary on popular culture, consumerism, corporality and religion. Rather than indulge in the sort of deeply reflexive tendencies exhibited by the foremost artists and critics of the genre, Azorro took to poking fun at the art world - and themselves - through irony and self-derision. By taking a step back from what was happening in contemporary art at the time, they provided a commentary on the many paths taken by artists - and the lack of paths thereof. Referring to the biblical axiom that "there is nothing new under the sun", Azorro explores various ways of making it big in the art world - only to conclude in the end that it's all been done before. They consider the properties and proportions of, for example, an ideal sculpture - wondering all the while whether anyone has managed to approach such an ideal.
Their medium of choice is low-budget video, giving their spouted ruminations an amateur, populist feel. They play with convention and take jabs at artists and their work - much like anyone else who's not a big fan of what's out there in the art world. Nonetheless, in spite of all their protest, the nature of their process and philosophy capture Azorro within the confines of these very conventions - whether they like it or not.
The goal of the "Last Show" retrospective, curated by Joanna Zielińska, is to provide a comprehensive and critical survey of Azorro's work. Their Last Film (2010) invites spectators behind the scenes of the group's practices, shattering the myth to a large extent. The exhibition also features other archive materials collected by the group over the years - exposing the structure of the group, their main interests, their strategies and also their weaknesses - weaknesses that led to the ultimate breakup of Azorro after a decade of collaboration.