Monday | 14 November 2011 | 8 PM | No Local | Kraków | ul. Sławkowska 14 | II floor
Joanna Rajkowska (born 1968), lives and works in London, Berlin and Warsaw) is an author of objects, films, installations, ephemeral actions, as well as interventions in the public space. They can be treated as ironic contemporary variations of community-based art, land art, and so-called relational aesthetics, which the artist breaks down into constitutive elements, frequently applying the tactics of “participative observation”. Her projects reflect the changes in the reception and expectations towards art and its social functions, referring to the complexity of identity problems affecting the Eastern European countries after the economic and political transformation of the 90s. Rajkowska’s most widely discussed works, Greetings from the Jerusalem Avenue (2002-2009) and Oxygenator (2006-2007), functioned as contemporary “social sculptures”, activating layers of meanings (both historical and ideological), provoking conflicts, serving as specific platforms interwoven into the urban tissue of Warsaw, used for debates, arguments and manifestations. These works might be also considered as mere pretexts for discussion about the issues of land control and potential forms in which the collective memory might be manifested as public monuments. As Joanna Rajkowska’s works are materializing through “urban legends”, press-cuttings, gossip and media debates, their form is always “unfinished”, so there is a possibility they will evolve and mutate beyond the artist’s initial intentions. Rajkowska received the “Paszport Polityki” award in 2007 and the Culture Foundation Grand Prize in 2010.
Joanna Rajkowska, Basia, 2009.
Before she found herself at a nursing home, Joanna Rajkowska’s mother, who died in 2006, had gone through the hell of the Dr. Józef Bednarz Provincial Hospital for the Nervously and Mentally Ill in Świecie. In response to an invitation to participate in the project Reawakening - Reactivation (Town of Świecie - a New View), Rajkowska made an attempt to work through the personal trauma related to the disease and death of her mother, Barbara. Basia is a video documenting the artist’s several hours’ long walk around Świecie, during which, according to her own words, she ‘became her sick mother.’ Thus Barbara’s dream of escaping the hospital came true. Dressed in flannel pyjamas, in hospital slippers instead of shoes, grey-haired, clutching a black bag with a hidden camera, Rajkowska wandered around the town.
Joanna Rajkowska, Spacer, 2007.
Responding to an invitation by Krytyka Polityczna, on October 4, 2007, a group of 10 individuals, chiefly the periodical’s editors, went with the artist on a walk through Warsaw. The participants wore hoods on their heads that made seeing anything or orienting oneself in space virtually impossible, and headphones on their ears transmitting somewhat modified sounds from the outside. They walked at a very slow pace, holding their hands, led by the artist. Usually they went in a long line that was broken by whatever obstacle they encountered on their way, such as underpass stairs or road barriers. The route went from Krytyka Polityczna’s offices on Chmielna street, through the crosswalk under Marszałkowska street, the park near the Palace of Culture, up to Emilii Plater street, where the participants stopped for a moment by Intercontinental Hotel. Then the group entered the hotel, went to the service lift and rode to the 36th floor. The last ten floors they went up the stairs. The biggest problem was to access the roof, the way led down narrow corridors, past the servers, past all kinds of machinery, up to a small door. The door was placed so high you had to make a large step downwards to touch the roof with your feet, after which you had to negotiate a knee-height protective barrier. When all the participants were safely on the roof, they were asked to take off their hoods, and they saw the panorama of Warsaw spread before their eyes. My first intuition was the desire to see the Krytyka people in a context different than the editorial offices on Chmielna - to see their relationships provoked by conditions different than usual - without the hierarchy, without the editorial context, in an extreme situation. The action’s most important aspect was precisely that state of powerlessness. The moment when people don’t know how to behave and what to do, when everyone has to invent some gestures or react instinctively to a situation for which no codes exist, which isn’t linked to any rituals or scripts. You need courage to decide to enter such a situation, to make yourself vulnerable. When it happens, people start building new relationships, start touching the vulnerable spots. Small indiscretions happen, some people start feeling apprehensive. But it is then, it seems to me, that they become truly human.
Johanna Billing, This is How we Walk on the Moon, 2007.
Set on the Firth of Forth with its iconic bridges this new film centres on the sea and the experience of sailing. Intrigued by the contradiction of Edinburgh’s proximity to the North Sea and apparent disconnection of the majority of the population to it, Billing invited a group of local musicians on a sailing trip. Events unroll from the preparations on land through to the journey under the Firth of Forth Rail Bridge, the students’ first awkward steps in unknown territory. The commensurate soundtrack: This is How We Walk On the Moon takes a song from the 1980’s by experimental New York-based musician Arthur Russell, in an interpretation rendered by Billing and her collaborators using voice and string instruments.
Johanna Billing is a conceptual artist from Sweden, working mainly with video. Her works are very compact and characteristic for their lack of narrative character, strong emphasis on social relations and attitudes being the outcome of these relations. For Billing the most vital issues are: participation, community feeling, one’s engagement in group undertakings, or its lack, silent resistance and indecision. Music in Billing’s works appears to be very important - the artist herself is a founder of an independent Stockholm-based record label named Make it Happen. Over the last few years Johanna Billing’s works have been presented at a number of international exhibitions, such as the Istanbul Biennial (2005), P.S.1, New York (2006), Museum fuer Gegenwartskunst, Basel (2007) or this year’s Documenta 12, Kassel. Last year her works were exhibited in Raster Gallery in Warsaw.
After the screening we invite you to take part in conversation between Stanisław Ruksza (director of CoCA Kronika. Bytom) and Piotr Marecki (president of Foundation Korporacja Ha!Art).
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No Local Foundation proudly presents a series of screenings and discussions concerning documentary practices in cinematography. The project is taking place in November and December 2011. The title The (W)hole of Babel derives from the text by Hito Steyerl. It is intended as a overview of achievements of Polish and international cinematography without distinctions on documentaries, experimental film or video-art. We want to present to Polish viewers vast veriaty of documentational practices and different attitueds towards such discursive matters as historic and personal truth, questions of national/regional/flux identity, experiencing the trauma, condition of work in capitalistic world, tolerance, exclusion and its orgins and consequences.
Among invited artistes:
Joanna Rajkowska (Polska), Anna Molska (Polska), Michael Glawogger (Austria), Dżiga Wiertow (Rosja), Harun Farocki (Niemcy), Jill Godmilow (USA), Anna Baumgart (Polska), Sławomir Shuty (Polska).
Among debaters and pannelists:
Jakub Mikurda (film theorist, UJ), PhD Anna Taszycka (film theorist, UJ), PhD Piotr Marecki (film theorist, UJ), PhD Jan Sowa (sociologist, UJ), Joanna Pawluśkiewicz, PhD Piotr Kletowski (UJ), Joanna Sokołowska (curator, Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź).
Moderation:
Małgorzata Mleczko (curator, art historian, UJ), Patrycja Musiał (curator, art historian, UJ).
The project is organized with a financial support of The Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.
