Robert Kuśmirowski, "Cosmorama / P.A.P.O.P.", photo: courtesy of the artist
On the occasion of his solo exhibition in Trento the artist presents two installations and two drawings which will change the spaces of Fondazione Galleria Civica into a fascinating "time museum"
Fondazione Galleria Civica presents the first solo exhibition of the Polish artist Robert Kuśmirowski in an Italian public art institution.
Robert Kuśmirowski creates meticulous simulations of historical settings, where the artist's mastery combines, on the conceptual level, with his deep thoughts on our experience of reality and history, and of the role of memory and imagination in the definition of this experience. Kuśmirowski's art practice is the result of a careful preparatory survey of documentation, followed by a conscious sensory emphasis on the source documents. His environmental installations, conforming to reality and strongly utopian at the same time, are out-and-out time crossings where the artist brings the audience. They are reconstructions of hybrid places, match points between the authentic and the copy, middle earths hanged between verisimilitude and reinvention whose inhabitants are lost in a multiple time which belongs to us because it is part of the collective memory as well. They are also the result of a research on historical sources - sometimes forgotten or disregarded by the official historiography - which the artist presents to us with all the effective and incisive power of a current event which the audience is invited to experience.
This Kuśmirowski's exhibition, which is composed of three different projects, has a methodological character allowing to perform an analysis on some important aspects of his art practice: the archive research and the following work of re-proposal and falsification; the recovery of an historical document, which was given a new intended use; the reinvention and mutation of an art work when it is presented in a different context, to which the artist gives a new formal and conceptual aspect; the construction of projects which are constantly and/or potentially in progress.
P.A.P.O.P. (2010), a work realized in 2008-2009 for the MDD-Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in Deurle, Belgium, is shown in a substantially revised version: the replica of a big 60's analogic computer which filed and analized mathematical data. A techonological and scientific laboratory where empiricism and thought, utopy and reason, authenticity and fiction, science and art, past and present melt one in the other and cohabit in the space of the museum.
Cosmorama (2010), is the title of the new installation expressly conceived for the Fondazione: it is a box of wonders which leads the audience to another, parallel journey in time and space. A view through the work, from seven different points of view, reveals seven new works which show the artistic process giving birth to the artwork and its sources. Real and unreal images renew experience of watching "through", of traveling exclusively thanks to the "visual" and "imaginative" experience. The work recalls the 17th-19th century popular entertainments (Cosmorama) and their modern derivatives, such as the Fotoplastikon in Warsaw. This last still working device, allowing to view exotic tridimensional images, was originally designed for educational purposes and then, during the II World War, was used by viewers to escape from the war's horrors.
Two drawings complete the structure of the exhibition: they are drawn from two digital images of old prints portraying the life course of men and women, from birth to death, and they will be realized by the artist at night-time during his stay in Trento. These images are part of an in progress artistic intervention made for a series of in-situ projects organized by the Signum Foundation in Venice. These projects aim at the construction of an anthology of artistic interventions closely related to the architecture which hosts the institution. Kuśmirowski's project – curated by Sebastian Cichocki – is transforming the courtyard of Palazzo San Donà, where the Signum Foundation is located, into a gloomy laboratory, the place of an obscure initiative knowledge where the artist, whose interventions are not instantly evident to the audience's eye, plays the multiple role of alchemist, scholar, archivist, conservator, artisan and artist.
Robert Kuśmirowski's exhibition is supported by: Signum Foundation Palazzo Donà, Venezia and Istituto Polacco, Rome.
Curated by Andrea Viliani, Elena Lydia Scipioni.
Exhibition open from March 20 until June 6, 2010.
Fondazione Galleria Civica
Centro di Ricerca sulla Contemporaneità di Trento
via Cavour 19
38122 Trento
link*www.fondazionegalleriacivica.tn.it*http://www.fondazionegalleriacivica.tn.it** ** Source: e-flux