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Paradise Paradise
is the first group exhibition of the four artists Marcin Łodyga,
Jasmina Metwaly, Daniel Koniusz and Vladimir Umanets
since the conclusion of their one-year project “8784h” in Luboń, Poland.
Introducing the show is
Vladimir Umanets's “ouch!”, a sculpture of mineral wool, alluding to
proximity, both linguistically and as direct experience. Touch,
irritable and erotic, can have physical effects. A drawing, on the
sculpture's surface, results from a live drawing act performed by two
people. The sculpture re-configuring the audience's interaction with the
space – in its form and effect – the work draws on the body and physical
experience.
The site-specific show
at the Townhouse Factory oscillates between the physicality and
metaphysics of matter and thought, and the everyday. A boulevard of
dried palm trees, cropped and masked from both ends, is a monumental
intervention by Jasmina Metwaly and Marcin Lodyga in the Factory Space.
“Wide Black Lines,” (re)marks on exotica, the trees transform the
aesthetics of the space, at once seducing and alienating the audience.
The installation is the palpable framework of Paradise Paradise.
Marcin Łodyga creates a
recursive reference to the framework: “A”, “R”, “W,” is a series of
photo-stills from a film shot on location. A story unfolds around
heaven's protagonist, a femme fatal attempts to gas paradise, but in
fact at the end of the movie she gases her own uterus. The photos, a
plot in fragments, are the beginning of a film to be produced by Łodyga,
structured diagrammatically in the film-editing suite, as a study of
“black”.
The exhibition, an
idiosyncratic narrative of multiple protagonists, plays out Ludwig
Wittgenstein’s Logic of Language – the sense and non-sense in language:
Paradise City just
means city.
Paradise Holiday just
means holiday.
Paradise Paradise just
means paradise.
The artistic language
of the exhibition is largely inspired by Fluxus, an inter-media art
movement of the 1960's and 1970's, characterized by poignant humor,
simplicity, and criticality in reference to the everyday. All the works
in the exhibition suggest an engagement with a history of thought,
metaphysics, phenomenology and death – without yielding to visual
representation.
“Bar-Fly”, a
single-channel projection of an expiring butterfly, reverses the
symbolism associated with the insect, at once forcing us to
re-conjugating our aesthetic vocabulary and the way in which we are
conditioned to make associations and produce meaning. “Blue Screen of
Death,” projects a still image of a figure onto the water surface of
abandoned swimming pools. The touristic, as a constructed paradise,
becomes daunting, at once suggesting the construct of perception. In
both works, Metwaly, suspends the viewers in a dialogue between the
medium's formal characteristics and the subject of her work.
Daniel Koniusz takes
the smallest unit of the digital medium, as the subject of his work
“Digital Codec”. The pixel, is the sum of red (R), green (G), and blue
(B). Koniusz sets out to construct a “new paradise”, applying an exact
digital systems, extracting image information, and re-composing new
images based on schematic – seemingly abstract – color values.
Biographies
Vladimir Umanets
(born in Kostomuksha, Russia, 1986) is a sculptor. He studied at the
Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan from 2005 to 2007. By 2005, Umanest had
created a series of ongoing minimal performative actions exploring the
idea of being part of a static and futile existence. In his works he
combines objects that carry specific meanings, for example: rail tracks,
concrete blocks and copper pipes. Vladimir believes in art's detachment
from reality. In his most recent works he uses mineral wool, known for
its insulating and absorptive properties. Umanets has been living and
working in London since 2009.
Daniel Koniusz
(born in Poland, 1985) graduated from the School of Fine Arts in Dabrowa
Górnicza in 2005. He is currently studying Photography at the Multimedia
and Communication department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan. He
has participated in many group exhibitions and has had two solo
exhibitions. Through his work, he is interested in creating a link
between the two different properties of sound and image. He is
interested in the physicality of sound and its impact on perception. In
his work, he utilizes the simplest form of sound, frequencies expressed
in Hertz.
Marcin Łodyga
(born in Poznań, Poland, 1979) is a filmmaker. He obtained his degree in
Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań. Łodyga ran the
alternative gallery Plastyfikatory between 2001 and 2005. Since 2005,
Łodyga has concentrated around the continuum project “A”, “R” and “W”; a
polyptych combining four films through which one can see the traces of
the earlier, autobiographic and extremely physical performances and
experiences related to his training as a painter. His process is a
culmination of a personal and hermetic mythology, where symbols,
meanings and images are densely layered and interconnected. His work,
always only presented in fragments of theoretical texts, diagrams, still
shots and objects used during filming, allows for the necessary
juxtaposition that makes the complete in-take of his ten-hour film
impossible. Lives and works in Luboń (Poland) and Cairo (Egypt).
Jasmina Metwaly
(born in Warsaw, Poland,1982) received her MA in Painting from the
Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan in 2006. In 2008 she left to study and
live in London. In 2009 she obtained a degree from Byam Shaw at Central
Saint Martins in London. Metwaly has participated in several local and
international exhibitions. Her current works are time-based and bear a
strong correlation and references to painting. Her video works, create
space for simultaneous realities. They are self-contained entities,
often not commenting on real life or politics. Through their form, color
and scale, Metwaly constructs an alternative vocabulary translating
coded ideas into decipherable, less abstract content. The artist works
with projections on temporary screens and onto existing objects. She
studies the durability of images by stretching, refracting, blurring,
veiling or through exploiting errors of media devices. She lives
somewhere between Cairo, London and Poznań.
About “8784h”
“8784h” is a yearlong
(366 days, or 8784 hrs) collective artist project, which took place at a
former yeast-factory in Luboń, Poland. The exhibition ran exactly
between October 22, 2007 at 00:00 amM, and October 22, 2008 at 00:00 amM.
A countdown timer, installed in the space, diminished slowly from 8784h
to 0 – reaching the last seconds of the project marked The End of
“8784h”. During the one-year project, the artists lived, worked and
maintained the space. The artists produced work, individually and
collaboratively, as well as inviting other artists to experience and
show work in the space.
“8780h” was organized
by founders of the XR Gallery Marcin Łodyga, Jasmina Metwaly, Daniel
Koniusz and Vladimir Umanets. |
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