BNNT Sound Bombing 2011. Source: www.konradsmolenski.com
The Polish artist drives through the streets of Paris with his Live Musical Installation, challenging the audio threshold with high-intensity electro-mechanical noise. The performance ushers in the ambitious Intense Proximity programme of the third edition of the Paris Triennale
An active member of the from the young garde of experimental musicians, Smoleński blends genres to create video works and audio installations that push the boundaries of art, music, performance, engagement and spectatorship. He is known as a radical artist grounded in an edgy, post-punk aesthetic who experiments with the relationship between sound and image, sound and object, performer and audience. Sound is often the driving force of his works, with imagery serving as the framework for sonic elements that are often unexpected, even jarring.
For his live musical installations Smoleński expands upon his 2011 film Energy Hunters (incidentally, the film is screened as part of the core Intense Proximity programme). The film has been called both "disturbing" and "contemplative" in its depiction of two masked men in an aggressive confrontation expressed through an intense sound exchange on a drum kit set ablaze. The live musical performance BNNT Sound Bombing which will take to the streets of Paris on the day of the Triennale opening was previously presented in Poland as a series of performances that engage the artist and four other performers on board a truck producing electro-mechanical sounds that are basically equivalent to noise - usually and deliberately inciting a negative response in its audience. The sound produced is hard on the ears and nerves to the point of being painful, even unendurable. The truck drives through the streets of Paris, intervening in the public space in a way that onlookers will not find easy to avoid or ignore. This extreme performances of "noise music" challenges the relative calm of the everyday through its unexpected and chaotic means of expression.
Born in 1977, Kalisz, Poland today Konrad Smoleński lives in Warsaw and exhibits his works all over the world. Currently he is among the most intriguing international artists of his generation, much like his fellow members of the Poznań-based Penerstwo group. He is graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań also is a member of a few bands and a member of the PINKPUNK scene. His focus is on the experience of sound and image, exploring its possibilities and various ways of engaging and experiencing various media.
The Triennale Project, previously held as La Force de l'Art, is a large-scale initiative aimed at drawing up critical reflection with regard to the state of the art scene in a national and international context. It takes as its starting point the space of artistic endeavour and explores the space across a variety of levels, bringing together artists whose works may coexist without necessarily sharing the same cultural ideals or aesthetic principles. Civil rights, social issues and personal identity are major elements of the exhibition, as exemplified by this year's theme Intense Proximity. Art as Network.
Artistic director Okui Enwezor explains that the concept of Intense Proximity is an "organising principle" that welcomes the "inherent tensions" between various aesthetic and social issues. In his curatorial statement Enwezor explains that at its core, the exhibition
is based on a series of programmatic directions on the ways of sharing space, social experience, and aesthetic antagonism without resorting to the strident pieties of identity politics, nativist self-regard, ethnocentrism, and myths of national cultural cohesion. The proximity suggested here is with regards to both the public’s physical relationship to the artistic works, but also with metaphoric combinations that sometimes exacerbate the relationship between art and society. Fundamentally, the goal of the project is to shift from the idea of national space, as a constituted physical location, to a frontier space that constantly assumes new morphologies (local, national, trans-national, geo-political, denational, contaminated, etc.)
The concepts of Intense Proximity are presented through the main Triennale exhibition presented at the Palais de Tokyo, which includes a film series (featuring Smoleński's Energy Hunters screened on the 22nd of April) and an exhibition of works of art and photography by a roster of international artists that includes Poland's Ewa Partum, Teresa Tyszkiewicz and Aneta Grzeszykowska. The body, in particular the female body in the case of the works of these three so-called feminist artists who were active particularly in the turbulent times of the early 1980s, is at the heart of the Intense Proximity exhibition as it examines the relationship between the physical body and personal identity.
Konrad Smoleński's BNNT Sound Bombing takes to the streets of Paris as the opening event of the Paris Triennale on the 19th of April, starting in the neighbourhood of the Palais de Tokyo (Saut du Loup) at 10:00 in the evening, followed by a sound performance by Lebanese-born artist Tarek Atoui (23:30).
Smoleński's film Energy Hunters (2011, 23 min) is being screened at the Alice Guy screening room at the Palais de Tokyo at 8:30 pm, along with Marc Allégret and André Gide's Voyage au Congo (1928, 101 min) and Ahmed Bouanani's Mémoire 14 (1971, 30 min).
The Paris Triennale takes place at the Palais de Tokyo and the Grand Palais, along with other venues throughout the city between the 19th of April - 6th of July 2012. The Polish Institute in Paris and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute in Warsaw provided support for the Polish artists exhibiting at the event.
For more information and a full programme of events, see: www.latriennale.org/en/agenda
For more information on the artist, see: www.konradsmolenski.com
Author: Agnieszka Le Nart
Source: Paris Triennale press materials, curatorial statement, konradsmolenski.com