Barbara Piwowarska
27.05., 19.00 Uhr
This presentation - understood as a ‘footnote’ intervention to the conference and exhibition - will focus on the ‘avant-garde margins’ and international reception of the work of Polish early avant-garde sculptor and theorist Katarzyna Kobro. It will attempt to take the perspective of the contemporary artists who contributed to the topic and revisit marginalised avant-garde phenomena (referencing the a.r. group, Concretism, Neoconcretism, or the ‘Neoplastic Room’ legacy at Muzeum Sztuki in Åodź). It will include screenings of Józef Robakowski’s Kompozycje Przestrzenne Katarzyny Kobro (Spacial Compositions by Katarzyna Kobro), 1971 and Karin Schneider’s & Nicolás Guagnini’s Phantom Limb, 1997/1998, which combines works by Katarzyna Kobro, WÅ‚adysÅ‚aw Strzemiñski, Raul Lozza, Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica. Schneider and Guagnini first started matching Kobro and Clark in the 1990s, and ‘scholars’ soon noticed the compelling relationship between the two women artists and their understanding of sculpture as a laboratory of ‘social space’ and open spatial structure. This film includes unique material shot at Muzeum Sztuki in Åódź in 1997 of the artists playing with original Kobro sculptures, arranging them in ‘performative’ sequences.
Barbara Piwowarska is an independent curator based in Warsaw. She is the author of Jadwiga Maziarska. Atlas of the Imaginary (2009) and co-editor of Star City: The Future under Communism, published by Nottingham Contemporary and tranzit.at (2011). Since 2010 she has run the Footnote project employing ‘methodology of margins’, referencing existing institutions, statements and concepts in the format of exhibitions and interventions. Her recent ‘footnotes’ are devoted to the contemporary reception of the Polish avant-garde of the 1920s and 30s.
