CREATING THROUGH COLLABORATION.
Space. Body. Camera.
Summer master workshops programme for artists
3–17 August 2014
Application deadline: 7 May
Warsaw
Poland
Programme author: Grzegorz Kowalski
Workshop leaders: Grzegorz Kowalski, Artur Żmijewski
Assistants: Julia Bui-Ngoc, Tomas Rafa
CREATING THROUGH COLLABORATION. Space. Body. Camera is a unique art workshop conducted by Grzegorz Kowalski. The CCA Ujazdowski Castle for the third time now has the honour of hosting this event designed to enable artists from around the world to work together and broaden the horizons of their own artistic practices applying the genuine method developed by Kowalski, who is the head of the most important art studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Its graduates are among the world’s and Poland’s top artists, including such personalities as e.g. Artur Żmijewski, Paweł Althamer, Katarzyna Kozyra, and Anna Molska.
Kowalski’s method exploits the participants’ co-presence in the creative process in time and space by experimenting with the body, the relationship between the bodies and images, and film recording and editing—negotiating what is individual and mutual. This year’s edition will be attended by the artists who, after graduating from Kowalski’s studio, have created their own strong language of artistic expression. The programme includes an evening lecture by prof. Joan Snitzer, Director of Visual Art, Barnard College/Columbia University.
The creative process employed by Kowalski evolves in a closed space generated by a group. Kowalski says about the workshops: “It is aimed at those who draw joy and inspiration from working with others. Our focus is not on creating a masterpiece, rather on active participation in the process of communicating through visual forms and sound. We believe that jointly improvised activities will induce the participants’ creative potential, that on the emotional level we will overcome the imperfections of verbal communication. […] We propose that the participants mutually experience a new system of languages. Under the direction of Żmijewski, this mode of group’s formation will be confronted with an external space. For Żmijewski the workshop is an opportunity to discover the environment of the material and social microworlds of the other participants. And it would be possible to assess whether it comes in useful under such changed circumstances, whether in terms of cognition and communication it is still efficient and effective.”
About workshop leaders:
Grzegorz Kowalski
A multifaceted Polish artist: sculptor, performer, creator of installations, renowned educator, essayist and art critic. His artistic stance was shaped under the influence of Oskar Hansen’s Open Form theory. Since 1991 Kowalski has been teaching a diploma class at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. In the 1990s, drawing on the experiences with his students educated in the spirit of “education in partnership,” Kowalski created an informal artistic group known as Kowalnia/The Smithy, which included some of the most important artists of the generation.
Artur Żmijewski
Polish multimedia artist and art editor of Political Critique magazine. His works revolved around uncomfortable topics that drifted into taboo territories, and he applied himself to the issues of the human body and the Other. This period concluded with The Applied Arts manifesto, in which Żmijewski hammered out a new formula for social engagement that has been brought to life in the projects he has implemented over the last few years. At the Venice Biennale in 2005 he displayed Repetition—a reenactment of Zimbardo’s experiment. As the curator of the 7th Berlin Biennale he proposed to examine artistic practices in its capacity to transform social and political reality.
All information about application procedure and requirements as well as information about organisation of the workshops and participation conditions can be found at www.csw.art.pl. Please submit a filled application form along with all the required documents by email to kowalski.workshop [at] gmail.com by May 7.
