Autor: Paulina Olszewska

manchmal halte ich mich auf der luft fest

Artists:  Alexander Adamov, Rozalina Busel, Anastazja Palczukiewicz, Vasilisa Palianina, Lesia Pcholka, Nadya Sayapina, Antanina Slabodchykava, Varvara Sudnik, Aliaxey Talstou

With poetry by Volha Hapeyeva

Curators: Katharina von Hagenow, Uladzimir Hramovich & Paulina Olszewska

Galerie im Körnerpark
Schierker Str. 8
Berlin

03.02.–29.05.2024

Co-operation: Prater Galerie, Berlin & Goethe Institute in Exil

Photo: Marjorie Brunet Plaza

In 2020, massive civil protests erupted in Belarus, a country between Russia and Poland that was barely on the radar for the West at the time. Directed against the rigged elections and repressive policies of the corrupt head of state, the protests became a cry for freedom and an expression of the desire to live in a democratic nation. Artists and cultural workers were deeply involved in the protests; many were arrested and imprisoned. When released, they fled to Vilnius, Warsaw, Tbilisi, and Berlin to escape further punishment.
They had hoped to return soon, but weeks of waiting became months, and months have become years. They have since remained in a state of limbo between two worlds — determined to contribute to change in their homeland while not being physically present and living in a country where their existence is not officially recognised. In the exhibition sometimes i hold onto the air, young Belarusian artists reflect on the contradictions of their situation, looking back at the protests that radically changed their lives and their subsequent years in exile.

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Irrlicht

Artist:  Michał Zawada

Krakauer Haus 
Hintere Insel Schütt 34
Nuremberg

14.10.–24.11.2023

Photo:  Katarzyna Prusik-Lutz

Sometimes a flame suddenly appears above the surface of the water in marshes, swamps or quagmires. It illuminates the darkness, becoming a signpost for stray wanderers. In folk beliefs, this errant flame was identified with the damned souls of suicides or drowned people who could not find peace. They wandered around the world, appearing in the form of fire and deceiving lost people who, following the light, were themselves drawn into the treacherous waters of the marshes.
The errant fireflies were both fascinating in their unexpected appearance above the surface of the water, but also frightening, as they were associated with unclean forces and danger.
Michał Zawada uses the motif of the errant firefly to take us on a journey through his art. Together with the light of the campfire, we travel through the world created by the artist and try to answer the questions that arise in his work.
The landscapes that form the backdrop to his rearrangements are reminiscent of the Romantic tradition of landscape painting. It revealed not only the moods and emotional or spiritual states of a person, but also how he created a vision of nature: untamed, wild, impenetrable, standing in opposition to civilisation/culture and the world order created by it.
The artist perversely asks what nature actually is, if not the de facto product of man’s vision. It is he who defined nature and then shaped it according to his own image. Nature, which we both admire and cherish, is also a power that we cannot tame, which makes us fear and feel threatened. We try to subjugate and control it, even though it constantly eludes our expectations and reminds us how little influence we have over it.
The light of the fire leads us further, in order to bring us to another force: fire, with its destructive power, consuming everything it meets in its path. Fire consuming the earth, nature, spewing forth from within the volcano in the form of liquid lava. A fire that is a total destruction, but which heralds a cleansing and from which a new beginning is born. A revolution that will bring change and a new order. A promise of a better tomorrow.

Fire is also that great sphere floating in our galaxy around which our planet revolves. The sun giving life and energy, setting the rhythm of the day and thus the passage of time. It is also a natural signpost, marking the directions of the world. If we look up at night, we see the moon, a satellite of the Earth, shining with the reflected light of the sun. We also see falling comets, which announce the arrival of change, usually some kind of misfortune, but also stars whose radiance has reached us, even though they have long ceased to exist. Confronting the space of the sky is an attempt to confront a dimension that is unattainable for us, so unattainable that we can only think of it in terms of imagination. What if we experience multiple sunsets at once? Are there such universes and such dimensions of our reality in which this is possible? Or perhaps it doesn’t have to be at all and all we need to do is exercise our imagination.
Surreal elements appear in Michał Zawada’s paintings, such as hands that are not part of any particular body. They express opposition, resistance and the power of the individual against the world in which he or she functions and which cannot be subjugated, or the striving for a different, but not necessarily better, tomorrow.

The exhibition ‚Irrlicht’ is a wandering after a misfire that leads us through time, dimensions, space: those real, those imagined or fully abstract. It is a journey from the depths of the earth to outer space. Both equally unreachable, by which we can only imagine them.

Imagine a Breath of Fresh Air

Artists: BCAA System, Gabriela BK, Mark Fridvalszki, Seana Gavin, Eva Jaroňová, Nam June Paik, Kinga Kiełczyńska, Diana Lelonek, Ruth Wolf Rehfeldt, Milan Ressel, Leon Romanow, Adéla Součková, Maja Smrekar, Superflux, Suzanne Treister, Ondřej Trhoň

Curators: Jindřich Chalupecký Society curatorial collective (Barbora Ciprová, Veronika Čechová, Tereza Jindrová, Karina Kottová) and Paulina Olszewska

Galeria Studio
Plac Defilad 1 PKiN
Warsaw

5.06–30.07. 2023

Photo: Anna Zagrodzka

“Floral patterns on the facades reflect the sun, to which the real flowers growing in vertical gardens also turn. On the rooftops, hyper-modern solar power plants produce clean energy for a city where people and nature live in harmony. Vines are winding around and moss grows untamed.” In their article for cultural magazine A2, Jakub Krahulec and Ondřej Trhoň depict a vision of solar punk—“a genre on the boundary between wild online daydreaming and sci-fi.” At a time when we have barely started to recover from the effects of a global pandemic, and the devastating Russian war in Ukraine almost reaches the border with Poland (and with many other no less serious conflicts worldwide), this may sound like a rather ridiculous fairytale. While we face many humanitarian crises, uncontrolled inflation, an energy crisis and a looming food crisis, climate disruption is taking its toll in the background. Its consequences are already apparent on many levels, and yet we do not fully admit to this reality.
Therefore, it is not surprising that our current outlook is very distant from the utopian visions of the past: those full of unbound love, harmony with nature and reciprocity between humans and other species, not to mention the well-known socialist visions of “commanding the wind and the rain,” going to space and controlling not only weather conditions but also other planetary processes, all in the name of techno-optimism. Rather than the courage to embark on unrestrained utopian plans, today’s visions of our future are accompanied by anxiety and black scenarios. There will inevitably be a future, even if it is one after the extinction of our species. But perhaps there are more promising prospects after all.

The upcoming group exhibition at Galeria Studio in Warsaw elaborates on the theme of visions of the future on several levels. It involves projects by a number of Czech, Polish and international artists. The exhibition encompasses two main levels, which will at the same time reflect the spatial layout of Galeria Studio, divided into two floors, one above the other. One part will deal with the concept of returning to tradition and (our) nature, while the other part will focus on techno-optimistic or dystopian ideas of the future, which might be associated with science-fiction.
One part of the exhibition will critically examine the aforementioned solar punk visions and ideas about the future, linking green living with state-of-the-art technology, science and “progress,” as well as various strategies for survival in a dystopian, even post-human world. The other part will explore various strategies of degrowth, deceleration or sustainable living in harmony with nature.

The exhibition’s narrative will travel through time, but also beyond real time, to explore past and future utopias. The theme of escapism will permeate the exhibition, set in separated geographical locations, dream realms, fictional scenarios and old utopian ideas. But its purpose is not to escape into the unreal. On the contrary, we hope that by combining a number of various artworks and projects, hints of possibility will begin to emerge, from which a way out of today’s situation, that is oppressive on many levels, can slowly be carved. When it seems there is nowhere to run, we can try running into the future – and from there, start to reshape the present.

Aside from contemporary artworks, the exhibition will also feature several historical works from the Galeria Studio Collection, Miejska Galeria bwa in Bydgoszcz, the Aleš South Bohemian Gallery, and private collections.

The exhibition is the fourth part of the series Islands: Possibilities of Togetherness presented by the Jindřich Chalupecký Society, and curated by the JCHS collective and Paulina Olszewska, curator at Galeria Studio.

The exhibition is part of the international project Islands of Kinship: A Collective Manual for Sustainable and Inclusive Art Institutions, co-funded by the European Union and Czech Ministry of Culture.

Exhibition partner & co-producer:  Jindřich Chalupecký Society

Exhibition partners: Czech Center in Warsaw, Liszt Institute – Hungarian Cultural Center Warsaw

Exhibition brochure available here

Seeing with the Body

Artists: Magdalena Abakanowicz, Alicja Bielawska, Andrzej Bielawski, Bożenna Biskupska, Agata Bogacka, Jan Dobkowski, Barbara Falender, Agnieszka Grodzińska, Keith Haring, Zuzanna Hertzberg, Renata Kamińska, Natalia LL, Ewa Partum, Teresa Pągowska, Krystyna Piotrowska, Krystiana Robb-Narbutt, Erna Rosenstein, Adela Szwaja, Teresa Tyszkiewicz, Andy Warhol, Jerzy Ryszard „Jurry“ Zieliński, Anna Żuławska (from the Galeria Studio Collection in Warsaw) 

Curatorial team: Natalia Andrzejewska, Dorota Jarecka, Paulina Olszewska

13.05–20.08.2023

OP ENHEIM 
Plac Solny 4
Wrocław

Photo: Dzikość, courtesy of OP ENHEIM

The vampire squid lives in the deep ocean waters. It communicates with other members of its species by means of art: it changes the colours of its body and ejects clouds of an ink-like mucus, which it can arrange into various shapes resembling letters. It lights its way with its own fluorescent lamp, powered by an electrical impulse generated on the surface of its body. It is a Kantian animal, as the art theorist Vilém Flusser noted; the world is a product of its consciousness, as it first creates an image of the reality around it and then perceives and recognises it. Imagination and reality are the same thing to it. The soul is the same as the body. The exhibition is inspired by currents of philosophy and aesthetics that are critical of the human age. It draws on the intuition that some contemporary works of art tap into similar regions of sensibility that Flusser discovered in the beautiful eight-armed creature. And also on the conviction that certain artistic events in the 1970s foreshadowed such impulses, when one being tuned in to another on this amplitude of vibration.

The Studio Gallery’s collection was founded by Józef Szajna in 1972 at the Studio Theatre in Warsaw and is one of Poland’s most significant public collections of post-1945 art. It contains more than a thousand objects made in various media. Its main core comprises works by Polish modernist and neo-avant-garde artists, complemented by works by international artists. The collection is not permanently shown in Warsaw, but it is included in Studio Gallery’s projects. Most recently, part of it was presented at the exhibition The Studio Gallery Collection in Warsaw in 2021. The collection is growing all the time, expanding every year with new works included through purchases or donations.  This is, of course, a selection. Completely subjective. With a lamp on our heads, wandering through the dark warehouses of the Studio, we look around, communicating with each other using a system of signs that is not fully codified, but always clear to us.