Private Settings. Art after the Internet
Maria Bartuszová: Provisional Forms
25 September 2014–6 January 2015
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw
ul. Pańska 3
00-124 Warsaw
www.artmuseum.pl
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Private Settings. Art after the Internet
Curated by Natalia Sielewicz
Artists: Sarah Abu Abdallah and Joey L. DeFrancesco, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Ed Atkins, Trisha Baga and Jessie Stead, Darja Bajagić, Nicolas Ceccaldi, Jennifer Chan, CUSS Group, Czosnek Studio, Jesse Darling, DIS, Harm van den Dorpel, Loretta Fahrenholz, Daniel Keller, Ada Karczmarczyk, Jason Loebs, Piotr Łakomy, Metahaven, Takeshi Murata, Yuri Pattison, Hannah Perry, Jon Rafman, Bunny Rogers, Pamela Rosenkranz, Ryan Trecartin, Ned Vena
How does the technological acceleration and our daily contact with media shape the experience of identity and social interaction?
The exhibition attempts to answer this question from the perspective of the generation of artists born in the 1980s and 1990s, who entered the artistic scene amid the dynamic expansion of the Internet and mass digital culture.
The web today is an integral element of the everyday, which encourages increasingly bold design of one’s own identity and its management. The irresistible need to express oneself, one’s opinions, and the demand for “authenticity” of the message have had an irrevocable impact on our experience of ties and relations with another human being. What matters is affect and presence. And yet, the architecture of the web, in which we vehemently like, hate, recommend, and create ratings, often limits us to a compulsive urge of self-documentation and an optimistic affirmation of the “friends of our friends.” The exhibition is an answer to this metamorphosis of the social consciousness, highlighting it as an element which has fundamentally revalued the question of freedom, intimacy and anonymity of each and everyone of us.
Maria Bartuszová: Provisional Forms
Curated by Marta Dziewańska, Gabriela Garlatyová
Maria Bartuszová (1936–1996) has been, so far, a little-known Slovak sculptor, revealed to the general public in 2007 during Documenta 12 in Kassel—since then, her works have begun to appear occasionally in international exhibitions and some of them have found their way into prestigious collections of contemporary art. Bartuszová’s art has not, however, yet achieved true recognition: her works have been exhibited individually, without a broader context and with no reference to the broader dynamics of her work.
The exhibition Maria Bartuszová: Provisional Forms consists of an extensive selection of sculptures—some 70 objects presented in an area of 300 square meters—which the artist created between the early 1960s and the end of the 1980s. The exhibition is not, however, organised along purely chronological lines. On the contrary, it sets out to capture the tensions in the artist’s works, the relationships between them—whether causative or of development and inspiration, but also those of negation, excess and abandonment—her need for formal experimentation, the effort of seeking a new language of expression and innovative uses of material. Working with plaster—a material which, from a sculptor’s point of view, is both primitive and common, Bartuszová experimented with it and did not hesitate to treat tradition, accepted norms and learnt techniques as merely transitory and provisional.
The exhibition is accompanied by a symposium (Saturday, September 27, 11am–4pm) that will seek to animate the research on Maria Bartuszová’s art in a broader international context of the history of art.
Programme:
11h: Marta Dziewańska: Opening and introduction
11.20h: Gabriela Garlatyová: “Touch. Impressed Thoughts of Maria Bartuszová”
11.50h: Martina Pachmanová: “Silence about Feminism and ‘Femininity’ as an Aesthetic Value: Czech and Slovak Women Artists in post-1968 Art Theory”
12.20h: Anke Kempkes: “Maria Bartuszová—Pioneer of Form. The Futurism of Women Avant-Gardists”
12.50h: Discussion
13.15–14.15h: Lunch break
14.15h: Briony Fer: “Working Process, Thinking Process: Eva Hesse and Studiowork”
14.45h: Boris Ondreička: “On Corporeality and Rediscovery”
15.15h: Christine Macel: “Untitled, 1986: Some Thoughts Around the Artwork”
15.45h: Discussion
The symposium will be held in English.
Further press information and contact:
prasa [at] artmuseum.pl / www.artmuseum.pl/prasa
