Kozłowski is a legend in Polish conceptual art. Already long before the Cold War period had come to an end, his studio opened a window towards Western Europe: in the early 1970s, he established the artist network NET with over 350 international artists (thereby also arousing the interest of the secret service) and was a central protagonist of the Fluxus movement in Poland. In 1977, he organized a Fluxus festival at the gallery Akumulatory 2 (1972–90) that he founded, exhibiting the artists Richard Long, Reiner Ruthenbeck, Franz Erhard Walther, Victor Burgin, and Douglas Huebler, among others.

From the outset, Kozłowski has been dealing with concepts of space, time, logics, and language in his work. In the exhibition Words and Colors at the gallery ŻAK | BRANICKA, he is now presenting a selection of works from the past five decades. The dry, unemotional title of the exhibition reflects the analytical strategy characteristic for conceptual art, which shows a predilection for narrowing itself down to the naming of facts. The reduction of means indeed offers ample visual appeal, and the content of the exhibition is surprising: its focus is on color and the perception thereof, as was already a common theme in art history one hundred years ago. The prejudices associated with the notion of conceptual art are thus ironically refuted by Kozlowski.

The famous work Wall Painting was already exhibited at the gallery René Block in Berlin almost 40 years ago. It consists of several different-colored panels made of paper or ingrain wallpaper. The panels are color samples from walls that Kozłowski had personally painted – like a typical craftsman – in various apartments in Poznan, Berlin, and London, around 1979. At the time, these commissions had been paid by the respective customers according to tariff, per square meter. Hence, the actual originals are the colored walls (though it is doubtful whether these still exist today); the panels merely present color samples. With his work, Kozłowski was thus calling painting into question as a creative act of the artist.

In another work titled Exercises in Aesthetics from 1976, Kozłowski investigates the correlations between image and word: "59 varying color samples are evaluated aesthetically in the same way: nor beautiful nor ugly. This phrasing was also chosen by Marcel Duchamp when he described that he had selected his readymades according to the criterion of aesthetic indifference. In Kozlowski’s case, the colors are not paintings, but readymades of equal value, self-referential and resistant to traditional aesthetic conceptions, through which they manifest their artistic autonomy. […] With Duchamp’s readymades, the creative act of the artist had basically already been reduced to a verbal declaration act, merging together object of utility and artwork. The ‘Specific Objects’ of Minimal Art and Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes likewise negate authorship, originality, and representation; rather, it is the idea that is foregrounded, which finally becomes the central formulation in conceptual art and renders the artwork as object superfluous. The logical structure of language is moreover turned into a representational model of reality, and thus the foundation of perception and realization.” (Björn Egging)

One does not have to be familiar with either Duchamp or Warhol, however, in order to clearly recognize the effect, which extends far beyond the context of art. Just like when in 1982, Kozłowski painted a wall in green at the gallery Akumulatory 2, and wrote upon it with red color: “Green Wall out of the context (e.g. political)”. For the secret service, this was enough to have the exhibition closed the next day. The same work – only in grey color – that was shown at the The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York (1990) shortly after The Wende in turn caused a stir and induced several political commentaries on the grey reality behind the Iron Curtain. The issue concerning how freed of context (including political context) art can be is investigated by Kozlowski in his work News Games, for which he overpainted international newspapers with different colors, and folded and tucked them into white paper bags. “Here, Kozłowski is undertaking a form of anti-painting on a meta level that allows him to attain a high degree of artistic autonomy […]. Up to this day, for Kozłowski, this liberty is the prerequisite to keeping a critical distance from the political conditions.” Kozłowski unveils the thought patterns through which we and our society function. It is now in the hands of the beholder to decide what this realization means to him or her. Just like in real life.

Born in 1945 in Srem, in the years 1963-69, he studied painting at the State Graduate School of Visual Arts in Poznań, where he has also taught since 1967. In the years 1981-87, he served as the academy's rector. In 1991-93, he was programming curator of the gallery and collection of the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw. Fellowships with The British Council in London (1979) and DAAD Berlin (1984-85). His work has been shown in several museums and institutions such as Galerie Foksal, Warsaw (1972), Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz (1994), Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (1986), Brno House of Arts, Brno (2000), 8. Sydney Biennale (1990) and 27. Biennale São Paulo (2006) among others. His work is a part of several international collections such as the MoMA in New York, MAM São Paulo, Generali Foundation, to name a few. He lives and works in Poznań.

image: Jarosław Kozłowski, News Games, 2014, installation © the artist, courtesy ŻAK | BRANICKA

The exhibition Elements of Peaceful Engagement is an attempt to redefine the concept of sculpture in light of questions relating to the physical and mental process of its creation and its relation to space. The title refers to a person’s character or a strategic system that merges with office standards, which in turn, tailors a decision making process. The series of sculptures and sculptural collages created by Marlena Kudlicka take the viewer back to the avant-garde tradition of constructivism and the subsequent practice of the Polish avant-garde. Nevertheless, in her way of understanding the particularity of sculpture and its function in space, the artist draws more deeply from the history and tradition of this medium.

Marlena Kudlicka’s work is based on the space she describes as the “container of counterpoints”. She sees it as an objective frame, such as a grid or a technical drawing. Enriched nonetheless by a formal artistic gesture, her perception takes on a subjective nature. The space around Kudlicka’s sculpture thus becomes a place of mental processes – projection, communication, reception – and the so-called counterpoints that form space become the bases of the mechanisms of understanding and of action of the human being in space.

The universal language of mathematics used by the artist captures space in a perceptible form, showing the dynamics that occur between the work and the viewer. This process named by Robert Morris “the present tense of space” emphasizes the immediacy of its experience and the consciousness of its reception.

Kudlicka’s works rethink form as a technical protocol, where numbers and other mathematical symbols explain the parameters of a given idea. Like an identification plate, the sculpture explains the origin and the meaning of the artistic gestures and the decisions contained in the closed space of the exhibition space.

based in Anna Tomczak’s text for the exhibition sugar in the ashes. Official Capacity at LaBF 15, Lyon, FR

Image: Marlena Kudlicka, sugar in the ashes. Official Capacity oA oB oF, 2017, sculpture © the artist, courtesy ŻAK | BRANICKA

The year 2017 is of special significance for ŻAK | BRANICKA, that in 2007 had ist debut with the exhibition Datamatic 880 in the Galerienhaus at Lindenstr. 35. Ten years later, Kuśmirowski will once again transform the space of the gallery, this time with a project dedicated to the space and the building.

In his practice, Robert Kuśmirowski blurs the line between fact and fiction. For this project, he uses the history of the building as the starting point of his playful research. He collects, bends and constructs these finely crafted time hiccups as a means to remind us that the past has a tendency to repeat itself. He explores ideas of history and its representation as well as memory. But also demonstrates in an uncanny way the artist’s self-identification with an imagined collective past. Kuśmirowski uses the past as his raw material and simultaneously re-invents it through his use of fake pictures, forgeries and unlikely materials that question our individual and collective memory transforming the Present into his personal imaginary time capsule. Kuśmirowski assumes the protagonist’s role in these imagined installations where he is the actor, the director and the audience.

At the 4th Berlin Biennale his installation was modeled after train carriages used to transport
detainees to Auschwitz. He then created a life-size Bunker out of Barbican’s history and location – a site that was devastated by bombings during World War II. And, with his newest project for ŻAK | BRANICKA, Time as we know it travels back to the early dream of airtravel...

The earlier exhibitions focused on works from the 1970s and then from the 1980s. This most recent exhibtion now shows a cross-section of Wasko’s whole body of work and focuses on his two most important motive, Positive vs. Negative and his Relation to Colour.

Wasko’s oeuvre has gone through strong transformations during the passing decades. He started with conceptual black-and-white photography in the 1970s. In the 1980s, he mainly worked with installations and sculptures, until he finally discovered classical painting for himself. Despite the formal differences, he returned (and keeps coming back to), the same motives that have inspired him since the begining.

His most significant motives certainly include the contradiction between positive and negative. Back in the 1970s, in works as Things (1972) and Dematerialisation (1972), Wasko is looking at analytical photographs and asking why a negative seems to be unimportant; just as if it was the weakness of photography, and only the print (the positive) becomes the “real“ photograph. With his experiments he investigates this phenomenon and tries to revise the significance of the source: for me, it was about the equality of both realities, he says. Decades later, in more recent series such as War Games (2003) or Timeline (2014), he tries to fabricate the nonexistent negatives of digital photographs.

The central theme of the exhibition is Wasko’s relation to colour, which has evolved during in the course of time. He explains the fear of colour among the artists of the avantgarde of the 1970s: the rule of ”sparingness” used to prevail. Although at that time, colour photography was already quite common (mainly in commercials and tourism), the majority of the artists used to avoid colour and continued to work with black-and-white photography. We thought that in this way ideas could be brought to the point much more clearly and that they would be free of unnecessary decoration. Despite this he will later discover colour for himself. Wasko leaves photography behind and picks up the paintbrush. This was for him a similar statement to the one of Barnett Newman: Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue (to which the title of this exhibition makes a reference to), and also to Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square. With this gesture Wasko distances himself from the strictness of Conceptual Art. However, this is also an attempt to discover different media, to test the borders of their possibilites.

Ryszard Wasko studied at the Łódź Film School , Poland. Here, he became a member of the Workshop (Workshop of the Film Form, 1970–1976). In 1981, he organized the famous exhibition Construction in Process, which later underwent further editions in Germany. Wasko has received awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation three times, and has exhibited in the Centre Georges Pompidou (1983), at the documenta 6 in Kassel (1977), the Venice Biennial (1991, 1999, 2001, 2007), the São Paulo Biennale (1973), and the Sydney Biennial (1980). For two years, he was Artistic Director at PS1 in New York. After the German reunification, he returned to Łódź. Today, he lives and works in Berlin.

ŻAK | BRANICKA is delighted to present the group exhibition 3/1/1, a collaborative project between the artists Marlena Kudlicka, Ignacio Uriarte and Diogo Pimentão.

In our contemporary world there are no pure, unprocessed materials outside the frame of culture, outside of language, outside of forms and signs. In our contemporary world materials are objects — carriers of culturally and ideologically pre-given meanings and scenarios. In their joint exhibition, Marlena Kudlicka (b. 1973, lives and works in Berlin), Ignacio Uriarte (b. 1972, lives and works in Berlin) and Diogo Pimentão (b. 1973, lives and works in London) manifest this awareness with regard to paper as a processed material, a shape, a measurement unit, a building block, a tool, and an image. Entitled 3/1/1, the exhibition suggests a variety of perspectives and interpretations to what we can associate with paper, and consequently with drawing, and therefore with representation.
For Kudlicka, Uriarte and Pimentão, a sheet of paper is not just a thin surface made of cellulose pulp derived from wood, nor it is a neutral, transparent, invisible support or substrate. For them, it is a historical set of textures, formats, and ratios which conduct a wide range of activities and behaviors. For Kudlicka, Uriarte and Pimentão, a drawing is not just an unsubstantial, preliminary sketch depicting the outline of an object, nor it is an inferior category of painting; it is an action — an operation in real, architectural, three-dimensional space. 

f=different 3/1/1 (2016), Marlena Kudlicka’s sculpture for 3/1/1, stems from the image of an industrial paper cutter. Skeletal, linear, and to some extent graphic, the function-like, geometric sculpture, made of powder coated steel and glass, spatially outlines a height-width ratio that thematizes the notion of paper in terms of typology of formats. f=different 3/1/1 is a sculptural, self-referential drawing in space dealing with the preconditions of drawing as such.
The wall installations of Ignacio Uriarte take the exhibition’s exploration of paper and drawing to a different direction. Practicing drawing not as a procedure executed on paper but as an action of and with the paper itself, or more specifically, of and with the A series paper sizes, Uriarte’s wall installations consist of repetitive arrangements of identical groups of papers utilizing the A series ratio and the ISO paper size system as a sculptural material, while blurring the difference between the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional, between flatness and spatiality.
Diogo Pimentão’s contributions to 3/1/1 articulate the exhibition’s ‘expanded field of drawing’ from an additional angle. ‘Soaked’ in graphite, his works can be described as paper sculptures (or sculptural papers) whose meaning and shape change and are constantly redefined in accordance to the viewer’s point of view (as seen, for example, in Walk (2015)), and to the actual site in which they are displayed (as seen, for example, in Sudden (Shape) (2015)). The structural logic which 3/1/1 is based upon resonates a sort of an endless relay race. The exhibition is like one big track divided into three sections. As indicated in the exhibition’s poster, each of the three artists covers one section and the edges of each section overlap the others: Kudlicka’s Sculpture and Language stretches into Uriarte’s Language and Drawing, which stretches into Pimentão’s Drawing and Sculpture, which then stretches into Kudlicka’s Sculpture and Language, and so forth.   

On the structural level, the exhibition predetermines the diffusion of each section of works into the others. While maintaining the distinction between the individual artistic contributions of its three artists, 3/1/1 seeks to delicately undermine the position of the artist as a singular, sovereign author. 
Kudlicka’s, Uriarte’s and Pimentão’s experiments with paper and drawing situate their work in affinity to Donald Judd’s 1965 characterization of Minimalist works as “Neither Painting Nor Sculpture”, as well as to Conceptual Art’s “Aesthetic of Administration”. In addition to its interest in impersonalized standards of paper sizes, and its diffusive structure, these references further emphasize 3/1/1’s link to the politics of authorship, but at the same time they enable us to observe the ways in which the exhibition disobeys the canonical imperatives of Minimalist and Conceptual art, and to face its subtle, yet inexhaustible movement between materials and processes, between emptiness and fullness, negation and assertion, passivity and activity.

Opening:     Apr 29, 2016, 6 to 9pm (Zofia Kulik will be present)

Book Promotion: Friday, Apr 29, 2016 at 5pm in the gallery KWIEKULIK, edited by Łukasz Ronduda and Georg Schöllhammer will be presented at ŻAK | BRANICKA by curator and writer Timothy Persons. A conversation between Zofia Kulik and Timothy Persons will ensue.

Film Screening:     KWIEKULIK – documentary by A. Zakrzewska and J. Turowicz (2011) and videos by KwieKulik
Apr 27 – Apr 30, 4pm at cinema fsk, Segitzdamm 2, 10969 Berlin

The artworks presented will focus on criticism of state opression. The main topic is Freedom: both personal and social, but also freedom to travel and of thought. The show is born out of a reaction to current political issues haunting Europe, in particular the issue of censorship. The artworks to be shown, made during the 1970s are as timeless as they are actual, showing us just exactly how easily history repeats itself.
The duo KwieKulik existed between 1971 and 1987 and became one of the most important art phenomena from the other side of the Iron Curtain. Over its 16-year span, they organized many performances, artist demonstrations and created many objects, videos and photographs. KwieKulik’s social and political activities, together with their uncompromising and brave criticism granted their oeuvre an extraordinary position in the avant-garde movements. The political nature of their artworks was, since the beginning, a reaction to the exclusion they experienced from the ruling regime. By refusing to resort to traditional means of expression, their methods were pioneering in the context of their time. For them, performance and the documentation of their works was also an extremely important part of artistic activity. Their postulate was to erase the borders between private life and art, with the statement: “The Personal is Political”.
One of their earliest works is the series Ameryka (1972-1985). Originally, Ameryka was the name of a magazine  published in Polish by the US Information Agency in Washington and distributed in Poland by the American Embassy. The magazine promoted an ideal lifestyle in the U.S. where only happy people lived. Browsing through the magazine, KwieKulik were struck by the images of smiling people, with whom they could not identify with, standing in the Socialist reality of their lives. As such, they wanted to create their own reality inspired by the American dream. Their photographs show them as happy parents who travel the world and who have succeed in their career. Ameryka unmasks the language of propaganda by deforming it.
The title of this exhibition is given by a performance the artists made at the Biennale of Young Art in Sopot in 1978. It was meant as a counteraction for having their passports revoked by the Polish Government, preventing them from traveling to an interdisciplinary workshop in Arnheim (The Netherlands), in that same year. The reasons behind this revocation were two photographs in the catalogue from the exhibition centre Malmö in Stockholm. In one, Zofia Kulik is shown in her studio working on a sandstone memorial tablet. In the background, a large plaster eagle – the emblem of the People’s Republic of Poland – made by another artist leans against the wall. The inscription in the photo was: A Bird of Plaster for Bronze in the Barracks of Fine Arts. In the second photograph, a clay nude, made by Przemysław Kwiek, is entitled Man-Dick. The composition of these two pictures caused the so-called “Eagle affair” where the Polish government accused the artists of having performed actions in Sweden that profaned the patriotic eagle. Thus, KwieKulik lost any financial help from the government and were banned from representing Polish art abroad for the next couple of years. The Monument Without a Passport became a memorial for bureaucratic aggression. Without the ability to travel, KwieKulik asked the organizers in Arnheim to make a performance based on their instructions in which Joseph Beuys participated. Both these historical photographs will be shown at the gallery.
Shortly before Martial law was introduced in Poland in 1981 they participated in the exhibition New Artwork from Poland at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart for which they produced the video performance Supermarket. Throughout the video, the artists stroll around a supermarket (full of ‘foreign’ goods) and are overwhelmed by all the abundance surrounding them, they can’t decide what to pick and end up leaving the shop without buying anything. The abstruse situation in the film points out the contrast between the reality of where KwieKulik live and a utopia where dreams come true.
Years later, they went on a Trip Around Europe, the second video to be shown. The two artists travelled in a small Fiat 126p around Germany and Belgium carrying with them a tent, sleeping bags, a camping stove, their camera and even some artworks. During their journey, KwieKulik realised and documented several projects and met up with artist friends such as Joseph Beuys and Elisabeth Jappe.





ŻAK | BRANICKA will host a daily screening of the documentary KWIEKULIK, directed by A. Zakrzewska and J. Turowicz as well as some videos of KwieKulik at the nearby cinema fsk.

Cinema fsk
Segitzdamm 2
10969 Berlin
The screenings will run between 27 – 30 April, 2016 everyday at 4 pm.

The show follows as a continuation of their ongoing interest in how modernity shapes our cultural and political reading of the present, (which the artists explored at Kronika Gallery in Orphans of Culture, Legends and Heroes, 2007, a show curated by Sebastian Cichocki). The inseparable connection of faith and the metaphysical, present in We are all in this alone (56. Venice Biennale, 2015) and Unspoken (Malmö Konstmuseum, 2015), also features in their most recent series Oneness (2015). Made of 11 panels with drawings made on hand-woven linen fabric, the work is based on a conceptual work with text by Ad Reinhardt and graphic design by Bridget Riley published in 1966 in Poor.Old.Tired.Horse No 18, a magazine for concrete poetry, edited by Ian Hamilton Finlay.

We found simplicity in the text and metaphysics in the design and wanted to explore that further. This particular text by Ad Reinhardt can read as a concrete poem, it has a specific tone of urgency and corresponds very much with issues in our practice (e.g. institutional critique, contextualization of art production, personal politics). He says ‘There is one fine art, one museum of fine art, one art system” etc. and this singular, affirmative, ‘mantra-like’, intelligently critical and absurd statement is strangely reflective of the world we inherited and can be engaged (along with Riley’s drawing of zero’s) in continuum – a progression of both conceptual and aesthetical values. We have been interested in the use and history of linen as a material; this linen in particular, is of Eastern European origin from the turn of the last century, and was made for burial services of the wealthy. As a material that links narrative forms from the Past to the Present, the panels function as traditional surfaces where social practices of rituals are re-imagined. We collaborated in part with the Monastery of the Holy Mother of God, (village of Matka, Macedonia), in order to better understand the material. The technique for working with hand-woven linen and some of the techniques of embroidery are mostly done in isolation and solitude. This way, we are also trying to emphasize the dualities of the private and public, spoken and unspoken, written and vocal, that generate various forms of resistance in different cultures. (Hristina Ivanoska & Yane Calovski)

The process of writing, the form of expressing ideas through words and letters and finally presenting the text as a visual work become very important in my recent artistic practice. This particular text focuses on the performativity of writing, on its history and on the need of expressing one’s own ideas only through writing. (Hristina Ivanoska)

I am interested in the engagement with archives, in creating new documents and in using various drawing and writing techniques to achieve certain results. I analyze my connection to historical temporality, juxtaposing my writing with found sources, editing and processing information that seems accessible yet very private. I type, draw and sculpt out of my discoveries in the hope that they will engage the imagination of the viewer in ways that are not overly scripted. (Yane Calovski)

ŻAK | BRANICKA is proud to present Fibonacci Chaos, the third solo show at the gallery by artist Szymon Kobylarz (b. 1981, PL).

Szymon Kobylarz is an artist who likes to draw from the methods and accomplishments of science. He is not interested, however, in what science has proven and explained; his passion is for things whose existence science acknowledges, but for which it still has no response.

Kobylarz has explored parascientific theories, simulations, and scientific visions (The Man Who Survived the End of the World, 2011), he has investigated areas where the rationality of science has phased into madness (Model 1:1.5, 2007) or has verged on conspiracy theory and paranoia (Echelon70, 2009), and where science has failed, becoming a caricature of itself (Civil Defence, 2009-2012). He is fascinated by the application of a rational element in guesswork and hypotheses: he has reconstructed legends (The Story of Alojzy Piątek, 2009), police information (Stuffy, 2010), and press reports (The Cell of Mr. Jan Kolano, 2008).

In his latest exhibition, Fibonacci Chaos, Kobylarz focuses on mathematics, and in particular the way the Fibonacci Sequence, the “φ” (phi) numeral, fractal geometry, and the golden ratio appear in natural constructions: from the DNA code, through human proportions, the height of plants, the shape of a snowflake, hurricanes, and the shape of galaxies. This phenomenon is commonly known (theories about this are particularly popular on Youtube), yet to this day it has no known explanation.

In his works from the Fibonacci Chaos' series, Kobylarz transfers precise numbers onto simplified forms that imitate nature. He builds models of bushes and trees out of wood, while the length, thickness, and angle of their branches is calculated and determined by a formula. This is how the “perfect tree” models are made. Nonetheless, despite very precise premises, the final effect is beyond control: “I believe that with these works I am showing the inconstancy of the human hand as compared to the precision of numbers, mathematics, and computers, which deal much more quickly and precisely with such simple figures. The mistakes I make while sculpting these works, however, are much the same as what the wind is for the trees,” says Kobylarz. The calculated aesthetic component is an essential part of the project. All the works are based on the Fibonacci Sequence, and as such, are directly linked with the number “φ” (phi), also known as the golden ratio, which is deeply rooted in our culture. When we use it we inevitably find harmony and eye-pleasing proportions.

A major element of Kobylarz’s work is the use of simple materials and production technologies involving manual processing. The material used is mainly various kinds of wood recycled from waste products. On the one hand it is biological, and on the other it has been machine processed (and prepared for use by technology), or previously served as ready-made household products (chairs, tables, etc.). Reworking this wood back into biological forms, it becomes what it previously was. The process of hand-working the material provides the opportunity to make mistakes, and is the opposite of the initial precise mathematical construction. The intersection of human error, the unpredictable material (there are cracks, knotholes, and the type and quality of the wood), and cold mathematics is crucial to the artist. Kobylarz’s work is like visualizations of mathematical concepts, even more, it tests them – insofar as a model construction by its (concept) formulae (or rules) is true. Johannes Keppler once claimed that “God is a mathematician,” and that “geometry existed before the Creation, is co-eternal with the mind of God, is God Himself.” If so, Kobylarz is checking if God also makes mistakes: only art could be so bold.

In order to begin anew in Berlin, Wasko had to return to his roots: to the history of the avant-garde in the 1920s, and the origins of experimental film with which he had grown up during his studies at the Łódź Film School. Here, especially the artists of the group “BLOK” were of significance: Katarzyna Kobro, Władysław Strzemiński, and Mieczysław Szczuka. This is where he established a link in his work: his point of departure, were the writings by the author of The Theory of Vision, Wladyslaw Strzeminski. Wasko’s relief images From Darkness into the Light, whose color transitions are hardly perceptible to the human eye, recall Strzeminski’s “unistic” compositions, and yet they are by far more radical than these.

In Time Sculpture of Black Paint (1986) and Run Up And Cross (1985) Wasko started with separating a standard 35 mm film by breaking the linear continuity of the frames. This changed the rhythm and tension. He used different techniques to create these sculptures such as drawing and painting to create relief like surfaces by building up layers of paint on different materials such as cardboard, linen and wood. In this time consuming process of applying countless layers of paint he worked towards a three-dimensional pattern that eventually emerged from it. In Wasko’s works, time is an indispensible factor of the viewing process that connects both sculpture and film.

In 1987, Wasko created a small sculpture in a private garden in Berlin Zehlendorf that carried the title Quinta Essentia: a sculpture made of air, for which a hole in the shape of a step pyramid was scooped out of the earth. The geometrical form of the sculpture, not corresponding with the natural qualities of earth in any way, indicates that the sculpture was only supposed to have a short life, lasting at most up until the next rain. This project was followed by others, – most of them unrealized or unrealizable –, such as the idea of a pink fluorescent tube that was to be placed inside a hole in the ground filled with milk and then frozen (Rose-Milk Sculpture, 1988 - 1994). His utopias also take place on the canvas, as with the series of pictures painted with pure pigments, in which the same highly odd, sharp-edged forms are repeated again and again. These are lakes: Twin Green Lake (1989) and Green Lake Along Blue Path (1990). Why do lakes like these do not occur in nature? After all, there are mountains and rocks that appear to be angular, stair-like variations of a theme of more basic geometrical shapes, such as the square. “To understand the square was easy, yet I wanted to look inside, and explore its inner tensions. Hence these forms similar to staircases.” Simple elements like these require simple actions: “There was something ritual about it”, Wasko says.

The starting point for the artist is the so-called Jerusalem syndrome—an acute delusional disorder, being first clinically described in the second half of the twentieth century. Patients suffering upon visiting Jerusalem or the so-called Holy Land, identify themselves with biblical characters, and above all, mostly with the Messiah. Kozyra along with a film crew went to Jerusalem in the spring of 2012 to find those, whom at the beginning of the twenty-first century, believe they are Jesus. The result of this trip is over fifty hours of material, shot during the preparations for Easter in the Holy Land; images of Jerusalem, a stage for religious rituals, on which there are people of different backgrounds, beliefs, and creeds trying to convince the artist of their wonder and truth about being the next Messiahs as well as the colourful crowd of pilgrims and locals that are always surrounding her. Here, a continuous performance is taking place before the artist’s eyes, in which she is not the main character or participant, but only a recipient, trying to find and record every bit of what is going on in this holy city.

The editing process, the constantly repeated review of the material and its lengthened viewing is the next stage of the contemplation of this "presentation". At the same time, being the attempt to verify certain facts derived from the participants’ statements and to listen to their stories “anew”, which builds its own history, an alternative scenario from the beginning. It is also a moment in which the artist asks herself as well as us, the next questions: What are the mechanisms that shape our beliefs and our faith? How do we perceive reality and how do we build its view? Isn’t a critical approach and a constant verification of facts, just another kind of the intuitive desire to believe in the power of reason?

Based on a text written by Radonja Leposavić

An ordinary gesture—a line scratched on a frame of film (Idle Line, 1992)—he sees as analytic, an element that visualizes time and motion, the most basic elements of cinematography. In other works Robakowski has used the line to explore the synchronicity of sound and image. He often sees the course of the line as a kind of action that releases energy: “In 1976 I pursue it with a movie camera, but a moment later I also run, drive, jump... to obtain a filmic image of my biological vitality. By giving this absurd task to the camera I take away its original function.” Films and video works with the line thus not only explore the typical psychophysical function of the image on the viewer, but also attempt to give the abstract image human attributes.

This exhibition is an artistic manifesto on analytic and structural cinema, which Robakowski has been exploring since the 1960s. One of the artist’s key premises is the disavowal of the narrative form of film and cinema’s representational function. Inspired by the theories of Karol Irzykowski (1873-1944), that the most important element in cinema is light and its function, and not the image of reality, Robakowski has focused on technique and a laboratory analysis of the medium of film. Examples here are the non-camera films Test I, 22x, and Test II (all 1971), created by manually working on the film tape (scratching, perforating, etc.), thus releasing light directly from the projector at a certain rhythm. Another very important premise was to liberate the camera from the control of the eye and the attempt to render the image objective, as exemplified by the film I’m Going (1973), and later by Po linii... [After the line] (1977) or My Leg Hurts (1990). Robakowski’s experiments of the 1960s and 1970s drew, on the one hand, from the tradition of the Russian Constructivists, on whose legacy the artist was raised, and on the other from the contemporaneous work of Fluxus, Situationism, and Actionism, which addressed the same problems as those tackled by conceptual artists like Vito Acconci and Jan Dibbets. His work bore a remarkable resemblance to figures in experimental cinema across the world, and to such artists as Malcolm Le Grice and Paul Sharits.

Forgetting, alongside Między [between], has become Stanisław Dróżdż’s flagship work. Since it first appeared at an exhibition in Wrocław in 1968, it has been included in the artist’s subsequent exhibitions, and in anthologies of concrete poetry. Originally, like all his works, it was in typewritten form; then it took the shape of a picture painted in black ink on white cardboard and displayed on a wall. Stanisław Dróżdż has presented his work as wall installations since the late 1960s, while the three later language versions (apart from Polish) of Forgetting (English, Finnish, German) were first put on display in 2000 at the exhibition curated by Anda Rottenberg, entitled Amnesia. Die Gegenwart des Vergessens at the Neues Museum Weserburg in Bremen.

The tightly grouped white letters of Forgetting, written in sans-serif, bolded font, use the strategy of leaving off the last item in the set to create severed right-angle triangles with sides of various lengths on a black background. This heavy figure shorn off some of its parts points toward the mechanism of the forgetting process itself, which, according to Dróżdż, is irreversible. In his sketch for this work, the artist writes: “It transfers the meaning of the word onto its graphic design, the graphic signifies an operation, a lack of particular content. The logical combination of two things with no logical connection—the meaning and its symbol, i.e. the word. A construction ensuring an almost maximum objectivity of reception.” [1]

As in most of Dróżdż’s early works, Forgetting joins the figurative with semantics. A key strategy is the reduction of symbols—the removal of letters. In Forgetting the letters vanish, their number shrinks, leaving independently meaningless fragments of words, the remains after the ends have been cut. Dróżdż’s Forgetting is imagined like the shrinking of memory, the changes to its shape, and the impossibility of grasping for its remote regions, the result of the pressure of time—a shift into the misty past. Forgetting is a natural attribute, like remembering, which is why both these acts take place in thought, i.e. in concrete language, in words and through words. Wiesław Borowski wrote of Forgetting: “A word from which a letter has been torn, like “forgetting” for instance, builds an unexpectedly concrete space around itself, initiating the process of rediscovering its full significance, without added contexts and definitions. For the viewer this space is an utterly new experience. It is as though the familiar word is being seen for the first time, as if now one must recall it all over again.” [2]

Stanisław Dróżdż (1939-2009) is the most important practitioner of concrete art in Poland; his concrete poetry made him the driving force of this movement in the 1970s and 1980s. In 2003 he represented Poland at the 50^th Biennale di Venezia. He was in regular contact with key figures of Concrete Poetry from around the world, such as Ian Hamilton Finlay, Eugen Gomringer, and Vaclav Havel. Since 1971 he worked continuously with Foksal Gallery in Warsaw. In 1979 he published the book Concrete Poetry. Selected Polish Texts and Documentation from the Years 1967-77.

The tightly grouped white letters of Forgetting, written in sans-serif, bolded font, use the strategy of leaving off the last item in the set to create severed right-angle triangles with sides of various lengths on a black background. This heavy figure shorn off some of its parts points toward the mechanism of the forgetting process itself, which, according to Dróżdż, is irreversible. In his sketch for this work, the artist writes: “It transfers the meaning of the word onto its graphic design, the graphic signifies an operation, a lack of particular content. The logical combination of two things with no logical connection—the meaning and its symbol, i.e. the word. A construction ensuring an almost maximum objectivity of reception.” [1]

As in most of Dróżdż’s early works, Forgetting joins the figurative with semantics. A key strategy is the reduction of symbols—the removal of letters. In Forgetting the letters vanish, their number shrinks, leaving independently meaningless fragments of words, the remains after the ends have been cut. Dróżdż’s Forgetting is imagined like the shrinking of memory, the changes to its shape, and the impossibility of grasping for its remote regions, the result of the pressure of time—a shift into the misty past. Forgetting is a natural attribute, like remembering, which is why both these acts take place in thought, i.e. in concrete language, in words and through words. Wiesław Borowski wrote of Forgetting: “A word from which a letter has been torn, like “forgetting” for instance, builds an unexpectedly concrete space around itself, initiating the process of rediscovering its full significance, without added contexts and definitions. For the viewer this space is an utterly new experience. It is as though the familiar word is being seen for the first time, as if now one must recall it all over again.” [2]

Stanisław Dróżdż (1939-2009) is the most important practitioner of concrete art in Poland; his concrete poetry made him the driving force of this movement in the 1970s and 1980s. In 2003 he represented Poland at the 50^th Biennale di Venezia. He was in regular contact with key figures of Concrete Poetry from around the world, such as Ian Hamilton Finlay, Eugen Gomringer, and Vaclav Havel. Since 1971 he worked continuously with Foksal Gallery in Warsaw. In 1979 he published the book Concrete Poetry. Selected Polish Texts and Documentation from the Years 1967-77.

"Whosoever spends sleepless moments in a bed in Sarajevo might hear the voices of the Sarajevo night. Hard and firmly strikes the bell at two o’clock in the morning in the Catholic Church. More than one minute passed (exactly seventy-five seconds—I counted) and only then was did I hear the slightly weaker, shrill sound of the Orthodox Church clock, also striking two o’clock in the morning. A moment later the sa-hat-kula spoke in a hoarse, subdued voice from the Bej Mosque, striking the eleventh hour—the ghostly Turkish hour, the strange timekeeping of distant foreign countries. The Jews have no clock, only the heavens know what time it is—whether according to Sephardic custom, or according to Ashkenazi. When all around is still and quiet, the difference separating men equalized by sleep is in the calculation of this hollow phase of the night. When they awake, they will be happy and sad, feast and fast by four different feuding calendars, and all their requests and prayers will be sent to heaven in one of four liturgical languages. The difference is sometimes visible and open, sometimes hidden and treacherous, but it always resembles hatred—this difference is often hatred itself."


With these words the Bosnian writer and Nobel Prize winner Ivo Andrić described Sarajevo—a town where four religions meet—in his short story entitled A Letter from 1920. Such places never know peace, as the confrontation between various visions of the world more often serve to emphasize differences, and not similarities. Meanwhile, political correctness notwithstanding, the idea of multiculturalism, so deeply rooted in European philosophy, will always remain a pious desire. This exhibition focuses on the ties between power, violence, and religion, and draws upon difference as a source of conflict.
: “The difference is sometimes visible and open, sometimes hidden and treacherous, but it always resembles hatred—this difference is often hatred itself.”

Is it possible, then, that in such places paradise and hell, day and night, and the sacred and the profane live under the same roof? If so, small wonder that the Iranian film director and poet Abbas Kiarostami wrote the following on the relationship between good and evil, and beauty and violence: "I have safely journeyed a thousand times from the sunniest day to the darkest night." The title of the exhibition derives from this quote.

Watching Maja Bajević’s video (Double Bubble, 2001), we are uncertain at first what culture or faith the artist’s words refer to: “When I go to church, I always leave my machine gun by the door. (…) I go to church, I rape women.” Reading statements by men, Bajević analyzes the ties between religious ethics and the dual morality toward the position of women and violence. 



Adrian Paci’s work (PilgrIMAGE, video, 2005) draws from the 15th-century history of the magical “transfer” of a painting—a relic of the Mother of God from Albania’s Shkodër (the largest enclave of Catholicism in Albania) to the Italian town of Genazzano. Paci has decided to reverse the course of history and restore the lost picture to the Albanians. He organized a public projection of the picture in Shkodër, while simultaneously projecting a film of Shkodër’s praying inhabitants in the church in Genazzano. In this way he literally transfers the sacred space to the sphere of the profane, and vice versa.
 

Igor Grubić’s work (Angels with Dirty Faces, photographs & video, 2006) is a documentary piece, pertaining to the miners’ protest at the Kolubara (КОЛУБАРА) mine in Serbia; these protests were instrumental in bringing about the overthrow of Slobodan Miloљević’s regime. 



Hubert Czerepok’s work (Salvation Islands, installation, 2009) consists of three bullet-riddled piles of holy books: the Bible, Koran and Tanakh. This work concerns issues tied to the politicization of the sphere of the sacred: here the bullets falls—literally and figuratively—between the pages of history. The artist alludes to stories of cases where holy books hidden in the pocket of a uniform have saved soldiers from being shot. As such, religion is both a source of violence and a form of protection from evil. 

Rajkowska decided to give birth to her daughter in Berlin. She named her Rosa, after two women: Rajkowska’s great-grandmother, Róża Stern, as well as Rosa Luxemburg, the Polish revolutionary from Zamość, who spent most of her life in Berlin and was murdered there.

Rajkowska made a conscious decision to move to Berlin, a city which has always been the destination of thousands of emigrants. Her project has become a kind of reenactment of history, and the artist’s seemingly private act has acquired unusual symbolism. The emotional and administrative consequences of this decision will be felt by her daughter throughout her life: from now on, in the space for place of birth, Rosa will always write: ‘Berlin’. The city and its history will be a part of her life forever.

In her "Born in Berlin" project, Rajkowska shows her unborn child around the painful locations of Berlin and acquaints her with the wounds of the past. She confronts society’s hope for the future (a newborn baby) with the city’s history. Rajkowska hopes that, in this way, the future will forgive the past.

At the same time as "Born in Berlin", the Polish Institute in Berlin will display the "Sumpfstadt" project, and the 7th Berlin Biennale will present the project "Final Fantasies". Thus, Joanna Rajkowska will create a trilogy in Berlin that is dedicated to this city, as well as to life and death. Furthermore, ŻAK | BRANICKA FOUNDATION and the Polish Institute in Berlin plan to publish the catalogue "A Guide to Joanna Rajkowska".


Joanna Rajkowska's projects in Berlin:

Born in Berlin – A Letter to Rosa
ŻAK | BRANICKA
Venue: Lindenstr 35, 10969 Berlin
Exhibition: April 28 – June 16, 2012

Born in Berlin and Final Fantasies
7th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art
Venue: Akademie der Künste, Pariser Platz 4, 10117 Berlin
Exhibition: April 27 – July 1, 2012
“Born in Berlin” was co-produced by the 7th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art and ŻAK | BRANICKA FOUNDATION.
Kindly supported by the Foundation of German-Polish Cooperation and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.

Sumpfstadt
Polish Institute in Berlin
Venue: Polish Institute, Burgstraße 27, 10178 Berlin
Exhibition: April 19 – August 31, 2012

Horvat approaches built space and time as series of elements, which can be re-arranged and reconstituted, as though the true nature of both might only become intelligible through the process of unraveling them. In these procedures—which include cutting and severing objects, merging them with other dismantled objects, or intervening in built spaces by emulating elements of architecture using cheap disposable materials such as sponge, cardboard and rubber bands—the space, the objects and bodies it contains (and which produce or contain it), all converge into a puzzling and uncanny field of new special and temporal becomings.

Ground Coil (2011) is an ephemeral arrangement of cardboard strips joined together to form a spiral which emanates from – or moves towards – the centre of the gallery space. The work transforms the space with a simple gesture using impoverished materials, negotiating and bringing into focus a dysfunction of several incoherent geometrical elements: the spiral, the square and the line. The linear cardboard strips have to be bent at different points as they follow the process of becoming a spiral. The round shape they eventually form will never be perfect and therefore the work’s transformation of straight lines of the cardboard strips into a circular shape contains a certain unresolved tension. The wider the spiral becomes, the looser and less circular it gets. The strips are bent at fewer points and the round spiral becomes (un)naturally more square, as if trying to adapt to the rectangular room that contains it. The viewer entering the space is forced to move along the walls and negotiate the obstacle, following its shape around the room. The gallery thus becomes a landscape, both constrained and activated by the presence of the parasitic object that inhabits it.

Horvat’s practice is embedded in ludic and often humorous investigations and inversions of the realms of the visible and the hidden, while at the same time pointing to the need to enter into new configurations of (individual, communal) potentiality—past, present and future. The latter especially comes to the fore in a new series of 30 collages, entitled With the Sky on Their Shoulders (2011), in which the artist reaches for what lies beneath the surface of her family photographs from the 1960s and 1970s, made in Socialist Yugoslavia, at the time when the idea of solidarity, belief in the future and progress were still at their pinnacle. Horvat’s mode of ‘entering’ these images—all featuring her parents as young adults—through a set of sophisticated (though nonetheless aggressive) formal gestures, suggests an almost infantile attempt of evicting the intergenerational transfer of the sense of loss and disillusionment. Scissoring between the figures or inverting the figures’ inside out in order to penetrate and expose what is beneath the image of the collective optimism is undertaken only to encounter the void, the blank spot of frozen time emerging as a distant sign of the coming fall.

(Sections of the text by Antonia Majača)

This decades long project is to be understood as one complete work. He began in 1965, with the so-called Details—painting on canvas—and expanded this idea into different media over the years. Integral to this project are his photographic self-portraits. Taken at the end of each work-session we see Opałka with the canvas he is working on in this exact moment in the background. These photographs are entitled Detail as well—appended to the title is the number that he stopped painting at in that exact moment in time. Each image is taken under the same conditions, with the exact same lighting, distance between him and the camera and the same dimensions (24 x 30.5 cm). In every self-portrait he wears a simple white shirt and looks directly, expressionlessly into the camera. From these individual portraits emerges a larger self-portrait of the artist taken over the years while working on Opałka 1965/1-∞. While each photograph defines a precise moment in time, together they function as an overall picture of the artist. From day to day and year to year his face ages, and within forty-five years a series of photographs emerge that make visible the otherwise imperceptible passage of time.

While the first canvases were painted on dark background, Opałka has been lightening the background of each painting by 1%, since 1972. Having worked through all the grey tones by 2008, he has been painting white on white since then. He calls this colour “blanc mérité" (well earned white). As with the painting, the colour of the photographs subtly lightens up from one work to the other. In the early self-portraits the artist still had dark hair. Today his white hair nearly merges with the background.

The eight photographs presented at ŻAK | BRANICKA gallery will be shown in an octagonal shape. Swiss architect Jean Nouvel initially designed the octagonal shape as a possible presentation for Opałka’s Details in 2002. The photographs are always installed at the exact height of the artist so that the eyes on the work are at the artist’s actual eye level. It is in this way that the precision that marks Opałka's process and works, is carried through to the exhibition.

 
In spite of the title, the series did not originate in Wąbrzeźno but in Berlin where the artist has lived for a number of years.  For him Berlin has become the same place of residence as the familial Briesen (Wąbrzeźno). In his photographs it is even hard to tell the difference between the two. Both towns are places that are non-specific, places that are easier to name than to describe – both with neglected gardens, carparks or disused and abandoned shop spaces. Similar and equally transparent, characterless and unspectacular spaces can be found all around the world. This is why these photographs could emerge both everywhere and nowhere, in Berlin or in Briesen. Zieliński's Berlin is a strange mixture of East and West, where the artist searches for his emigrant identity that has been lost somewhere between the two cities.

Each of Zieliński's series and the works therein have a connection to a specific place. In this series, the artist once again turns to his memories of the past and searches for the familial Briesen in Berlin.

The history of the Briesen series is furthermore intriguing from a chronological point of view; it is simultaneously both Zieliński's newest and oldest work. The first photos were taken in 1995 when the artist briefly lived in Berlin, but the idea to use the dispersed material as a whole only came 12 years later in 2007. The series is made up of nine separate parts – each comes from a different period, is created through a different technique and in a different size, and considers different aspects of the relationship between the artist and place. The main and most extensive body of work comprises colour photographs taken between 2006 and 2009. Selected parts of the Briesen series have already been exhibited at the Starmach Gallery in Cracow, the Centre of Contemporary Art in Torun, Gallery PF and the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw. A selection of works from the latest period in this series will be exhibited at ŻAK | BRANICKA Gallery.
 

PawełKsiążek is one of the most interesting contemporary Polish painters. His interests lie in the roots of modernism. On the basis of archival photographs and film, Książek finds common motifs for seemingly disparate themes, which he in turn connects in a collage-like-way on canvas.

The starting point for his newest project Poelzig VS. Poelzig, is the horror film Black Cat (1934) directed by Edgar Ulmer, and the personality of one of Germany’s famous architects – Hans Poelzig. The inspiration for the project is the similarity in Hans Poelzig’s name and that of the central character of the film Black Cat – the Austrian Hjjalmar Poelzig – played by the brilliant actor Boris Karloff. The film takes place in a modernist villa, the contemporary façade of which hides the owner’s dark secret and sexual obsession. He celebrates occult rituals and in the basement he hides a collection of beautiful women‘s bodies that appear to float in glass coffins.

The analogy between the two names is no coincidence. The director and the architect knew each other. Poelzig created the set design for Ulmer’s former film The Golem: How He Came into the World and Ulmer named the diabolic architect in Black Cat after Hans Poelzig in return. According to Hans Poelzig’s biographers, the architect himself wanted to be recognised at times as a demonic character: „Within me live many spirits and devils, if that is what people wish to call them. Only the hatred of God is creative and calls forth something new in people” he writes in a letter to his wife Marlene Moeschke. The onscreen relationship between Hjalamar Poelzig and Dr. Vitus Werdegast (the psychiatrist suffering from a phobia of cats, played by Béla Lugosi) reminds one of the relationship between Faust and Mefistofeles. One can consequently assume that the fictive relationships between the central protagonists are an echo of his personal relationships with Hans Poelzig and the director Edgar Ulmer.

Architecture plays a key role in Książek’s paintings and photography; it connects two worlds – the fictive (film) and the real – together. In the space of Hans Poelzig’s most famous realisations, he writes in the protagonists of the film: on one photograph of the stairwell of the Haus des Rundfunks in Berlin (designed by Hans Poelzig) he replaces the stairwell with those stairs that lead to Hjalmar Poelzig’s basement. In another, Hjalamar Poelzig’s room connects with the foyer of the Capitol cinema in Berlin. In the series of photographs shown in the exhibition, Książek also manipulates details: in the film still we are shown a door, however the artist replaces the door handle with one from the Haus des Rundfunks. On the walls of Hjalmar Poelzig’s bedroom, he places the genuine architectural sketches of Hans Poelzig.

This is not the first time that Hans Poelzig appears in Paweł Książek’s work. In last year’s exhibition of Silent Utopia in Poznan, Książek’s work was presented with the utopian architectural sketches of Poelzig. The way in which the artist works is reminiscent of the domino effect; those ramifications found in one project also appear in the next. Książek is also interested in the gothic aesthetic explored in his previous series De Stijl vs. Black Metal. Here the artist combines elements of modernism with the aesthetic of black metal.

Based on reality and film fiction, Książek builds a hypothetical vision of an alternative world that considers the extent to which the architecture of the twentieth century merges with mass culture and to what level it is embodied in society. Equally significant is that Paweł Książek is first and foremost a painter that has worked up his own highly recognisable style and the project Poelzig VS. Poelzig is the inspiration for his paintings. A painting is for him the final element of a complex multi level search. The whole process of testing and selecting motifs and pursuing „material evidence” on the basis of historical links is nothing less than a pretext for painterly development and a good painting.

One of the most popular artistic practices is the filling system: the active construction of an archive. Philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Hal Foster site this process in their search for a key to defining and understanding the trajectory of contemporary art. [1] ZAK BRANICKA presents work by seven of the gallery’s artists based on different forms and interpretations of the archive.

Zofia Kulik is an artist who has self-constructed archives composed of collected documents and photos. Starting from the 70’s, Kulik also documented performances and artistic life, leading her body of work to become a unique archive itself of the Polish avant-garde movement. Paweł Książek represents uses already existing archives, particularly the Internet, to build new structures that finally result in series of paintings and photographs that are composed into installations, as in his “Silent Utopia” project. The results of such extensive research into archives can often be the construction of fake narratives or the reconstruction of a once potential but unrealized history, as is seen with in Yane Calovski’s work, which employs various municipal archives of the city of Skopje, Macedonia as its source. This investigative process can even culminate in attempts to manipulate existing history, as Agnieszka Polska does by using old newspapers as her material archive and altering their contents with new technologies.

Private, as opposed to public or historical, archives may recount autobiographical events as in those painted directly onto film negatives in Wojciech Bakowski’s piece, “Shame.” The film set deeply in the punk aesthetic shows Poland as it was in the 80’s. The private archive can as well be a place for forgotten works such as Kataryzna Kozyra’s student work, “Karaski in Beef,” previously underestimated and later revived after years, since heralding wide acclaim. Finally, the construction of a forgotten or unrealized past is possible if the source material is real but what happens if the archive itself is even fake? Robert Kusmirowski’s film, “DATAmatic 880”, seems as though it is from the 60’s but it is he himself lying on the operating table replacing what would be the anonymous figure from the past.

Each artist engages actively with the form, approaching the process from diverse angles. In these differences, they illustrate the malleability of the archive form and the flexibility that it inherently allows.

The natural environment of a painter is full of dangerous fallacies and optical plunges, full of recurrences, dependence and rituals. In a painting that depicts a large, empty aquarium, the artist painted some of its panes white. In this way, the glass, like a display window donning an “under construction” sign, refers to the domain of its given habitat. This domain is fundamentally quite small and self-contained, but through it one can peer into other words (those external) and become seduced by further reflections, none of which can be truly permeated. One thus becomes quickly aware that Rogalski’s paintings are descents wherein what we see is only a substitute for that with which we are we are presented. They are a pledge and a Baudrillard-esque Simulacrum: the Aquarium’s painted panes consist only of color. The cocaine in the little plastic bags is also only color (in the series, “Ghosts”). This is a type of painting that masks even itself.

Optical effects drive the metaphor in Rogalski’s painting. The amount of mirror images, endless reflections and visual distortions, are inconsistent with the rules of physics, suggesting that somewhere behind our range of cognition, exist other worlds – or also that the worlds that we see are not necessarily reality.

Rogalski began by unmasking painting. He painted fogged up panes of glass and mirrors onto which the names of pop-icons were written. He also painted works in which the canvases themselves were over-painted (already sounding quite close to a tautology). Later, he concentrated on reflections: discovering in windows, mirrors, panes of glass, and even in tombstone portraits on porcelain that which is concealed within their surfaces. The images of reflections develop and more realities appear within and are mounted on top of one another – for example the interior of his studio and the view out of its window are at once visible. Finally, Rogalski is interested in optical fallacies – the lies that our eyes tell us. The series Closer depicts the doubled perception that we have of faces when we approach too near to them.

Rogalski’s self-referential canvases are as though glass panes behind which the artist himself stands. His newest works renounce any narrative – only the reflections in the glass remain. The Aquarium series not only portrays that which isn’t there but also plays with traditions of abstract and modern art. The entirety of this geometry – the reflection within a reflection, the square within a square, the figure within a figure – is an artistic echo or hiccup of the image that the act of painting, through the recognition of the process of seeing, achieves. The goal of Rogalski’s painting is essentially a deceleration of cognition. He holds the observer in the moment in which the eyes already recognize the form but have not yet found the memory of its meaning. And exactly in this instant – just as in the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude – the story inverts itself: the end turns out to be the beginning and neither the viewer nor the artist can say what came first – the image or the paint.

“…It is somewhere between these two poles – this abstract meander between character and form – that you can improvise a negotiation of ‘Gleaning the Gloss’. The gloss is the shine, the camp, the sex of it all. … It hints at a fugitive symbolism, reflects and deflects, is a physical and linguistic shiny second skin. And the glean is the assembling, the putting together, the story, the narrative.
The glean is the insane piling up of parts – like a Phillip Guston where you encounter limb upon limb knotted together in great bundles. It is the arena, the absorber, the social condenser, great emancipator and connector all at the same time. The glean is the dissembling, the fragments of circuitry, the patterns, shadows and game of visual dress-up with each element poised to deliver numerous punch lines. It is the wonder of the atomic, of bits made of bits, of suppositions and latent images. To ‘glean the gloss’ is an explicit invitation to unravel. …

The sculptures are not action figures, and like Teflon-coated Play Doh, we can pull and squish their meanings, but never fully penetrate the chain-mail of irony and humour. The agent provocateur – flabby and dubious – is a spindly transvestite, sloping upwards via hairy limbs to a ravenous midriff. The pearlescent blonde mash of collar is slick and sleazy, seedy and shuffling. At every turn, some wonderful foam expands on its own accord. Ups are negated by downs, and streaks of flesh and wild limbs offer themselves up gleaming and irresistible. Hints of the figurative rear up to be squashed by formal gestures and slapstick inferences. Sex is diffused everywhere – in the drips, the oozes, the uprights, the horizontals; in the wetness, the gloss, the pungent air of shame and the fun of being a pervert. There are objects, characters and obstructions, all bundled between the threat of grotesquery and comic potential.”

Helen Marten

“This is how they grow. Colorless asparagus, a dark room, planted in rows. Caged and refused the chance to photosynthesize. From toothless white masses these asparagus melt and are leaked out, find themselves in bundles under the bridge, scattered in a just-damp riverbed. There they are harvested and taken to be packaged and distributed by the spider.
The first to receive his bundle is the knackered horse, shriveled and surrounded by buzzing gadflies. As they greet one another, the spider generously rids him of his pests, a pleasure for both, as the spider hasn’t much chance to feed before his early morning route. During his own travels, the horse was once seduced by a Magnificent Frigate to whom he lost his innocence and from whom he eventually cultivated a bulbous red balloon protrusion of his own, an opportunistic chameleon. Now he attempts to use his own globular goiter to lure in his old friend, though it’s unclear to both if it really is a matter of physical attraction or if the horse, in his old age and exhaustion, craves only a solution to his pest problem. ….”

Roni Ginach

The Chimaera, a character from the Greek Mythology, is a monster/beast made up of disparate parts of animal/human, a hybrid in a transformed appearance. A fanciful mental illusion or fabrication is another definition of the word.

The exhibition brings together artists working within the same medium but with different approaches. In Stephan Weitzel's work one can find themes linked to questions around manhood, political issues and cultural heritage/national identity. A quite different form of transformation is occurring in the delicate drawings of Lisa Iglesias; wolves are growing intricate braids, creating an ambiguous image of humanity, beasts and femininity. In the works of Björn Hegardt furniture, objects and architecture grow together, inventing new hybrids and content to everyday items.

Mystification, parody, self-referential irony and plays with shifting identities are some of today’s most popular artistic phenomena. Only few know that Witkacy was already working with these ideas at the beginning of Twentieth Century. In 1921, he composed his text “Manifesto (festo-mani)” in which he derided the contemporary trajectory of art and ascertained that the only honest artistic position is a lie. “The most beautiful art – and who knows if not the most challenging – is a lie (…)always conscious of itself, are the wilful deceptions, however small, much more so than the unconscious superior lies.” Many years later (1988), video artist Józef Robakowski wrote in his own Manifesto, “Manipulate! (I Manipulate!)”: “I am convinced that an artist is a sort of perfidious swindler, a social ulcer, whose vitality is an exact manipulation of his own account…”
ZAK | BRANICKA juxtaposes three original series of Witkacy’s photographs from 1931 and 1932, in which the artist poses and assumes different grimacing faces, with Józef Robakowski’s “My Video Masochisms” from 1986 and “The Astral Photography” series that he developed in the 1970’s.
Witkacy’s photos are experiments with changing identity, purposeful and conscious humiliation, and reflexive irony that mock the perceived “Myth of the Artist.” He produced such photographs throughout his entire life, most of which were titled so absurdly as, “Unknown Photo of Unknown Movie Star, Carfaldo Ricci.”
In “My Video Masochisms”, Robakowski, making contorted faces at the camera, simulates piercing his cheeks with wire, drilling through his ears, and taking an immersion heater into his mouth. Deadpan, the artist plays as though he is suffering through his art and in its name. His contrast with his contemporary movements (e.g. Viennese Actionism) and ironic disembowelment of them is a glimpse partially into his nihilism and partially into his absurd sense of humour. Beginning in 1971, the series of hypothetical “Astral Photography”, provided with such witty titles as “Self-Portrait in Absinthe Fumes” or “The Imaginary Form of a Stomach Ulcer”, is a parody of the language of conceptual art. It is accompanied by a pseudo-scientific tract written based on the agglutination of lies and absurdities regarding a new method of creating photography performed by putting a negative against one’s forehead.

She extracts the represented figures, moulds them skilfully into life-sized sculptures and paints them true to the original photograph. In her process, Baumgart leaves out everything that cannot be seen in the photograph: half of each sculpture remains white. When viewed from the front the sculptures appear life-like, but any other angle betrays the illusion. In this way Baumgart reminds us that the allegedly significant photographs show only a fleeting moment, a tiny, two-dimensional cut-out of reality. 
Baumgart used this technique for the first time with her works „Natascha“ and „Veronika“ (2006). The former title refers to an image of Natascha Kampusch and the latter to a well known photograph of a victim of the terrorist attack on the London metro system. In the latter, the bandaged face of the unknown woman represented in this photograph became the synonym of the horror of the attack. The title of this work takes its name from Saint Veronica who is said to have offered Jesus a cloth to wipe the sweat and tears off his face en route to his crucifixion. The cloth was miraculously imprinted with his image and thus became “the true image”, or “Vera Eikon.” Baumgart’s “Veronika” shows an exaggerated bandage on the figure’s face but behind, one finds merely a white backdrop - there is no “Vera Eikon” and we can never know what really happened behind the scenes. 
ZAK ׀ BRANICKA shows „Veronika“ for the first time in Germany as well as her latest work, "The Hypothesis of the Stolen Image" (2008). The point of departure here is a famous image of East Berliners escaping from houses in August 1961 that would be imminently sealed off by the construction of the Berlin Wall. Using her now established technique, Baumgart extracts the figures, seen climbing through windows or walking away towards the photographer carrying their belongings, re-creates them as sculptures and half paints-them. The effect produced by this group in the photograph is somewhat uncanny, some figures are visible only from the waist up as they hang out windows. Baumgart suspends those sculptures from the ceiling. On another, the back leg of a woman is stencilled with “Reuters/Forum” representing the photo agency credit in the original photograph from August 18th, 1961. 
With her title, “The Hypothesis of the Stolen Image”, Baumgart adds further dimensions and uncertainties to the original story. The title originated from that of the film, “The Hypothesis of the Stolen Picture”, which was based on the novelist, Pierre Klossowski’s, ideas of art criticism. Filmed by Raoul Ruiz in 1979, it was a highbrow cult film of French cinema and involved a story about a series of paintings owned by a collector. The collector shows off his paintings to another collector, but, as he does so, the characters depicted in the paintings come to life. As in Baumgart’s work they unhinge themselves from a fixed surrounding and change their meaning. As Tableaux Vivants, they begin to mock the pretensions of the collector. One painting is missing from the collection, an unexplained scandal lurks behind its disappearance, and even the name of the artist is revealed to be false. Suddenly the understanding of the collector becomes uncertain. 
Baumgart extends this metaphorically in her work, noting that “[a] character caught in one picture steps out of the photograph like from a movie screen and 'takes a walk' in another image. This 'visit' of one visual and mental tale within another is also a duel between two gazes, two lenses”. She adds, “What could hypothetically happen if two stolen looks met and started their own new lives without control of the authors of the original pictures, creating a new hybrid narrative between reality and fiction. This new narrative does not yet have its picture and thus becomes a hypothesis of a [nonexistent] image.” The viewer, even when cued by the artist’s intentions and the background of the photographs, is still free to form his own narratives about what might or might not be going on: who are these people, are they real? What happened to them, what will happen to them? We write these “hypothetical” stories in our heads out of the whole cloth of the appropriated images that were once seemingly clear in their meaning.
Text: ZAK BRANICKA, based on the catalogue text by B. Kouwenhoven 
In cooperation with Gallery Lokal_30, Warsaw
Realised with the support of the Foundation of Polish-German Cooperation

Katarzyna Kozyra, recipient of Honorable Mention at the 1999 Venice Biennale for Men’s Bathhouse, presents Summertale, the final piece in the series, In Art Dreams Come True that consists of 13 videos: performances, quasi theatrical productions, and audience engaging happenings. Summertale presents a scenerie just as in a fairytale: midget women are working in an enchanted garden, when suddenly three mushrooms start to grow. They explode and produce three persons who have already appeared in the earlier films: Gloria Viagra, the Maestro and Kozyra herself. At first they are welcomed warm-heartedly but later on eyeballed with suspicion until finally their life is endangered…

In Fat Trout Jankowski explores the topic of cruelty that he has already taken up with his Frogs-series, in which the frogs are pumped up with air in a children´s game. His current works are predominantly presentations of animals on a 1:1 scale and are strongly simplified. Cats, foxes, fish, cows and birds emerge from these monochrome backgrounds. They all appear motionless, and perhaps that is what makes it so disquieting. They seem to sense danger, such as an impending fire, paralysed, yet ready - as if led by instinct - to run away in a split second. However, these animals appear calm, motionless and frozen in time. The inherent violence in his painting is not obvious; it is lurking in the background and doesn´t show its true face at first sight. The paintings display neither blood nor violence, but appear to be taking stock of dark potentials. The fight is over, the culprit not to be seen.
The weird presentations of animals allow us to evoke the graphic works of Pieter Brueghel, Hieronymus Bosch or Francisco Goya, with their frequently drastic displays. The character behind a mask is actually a bee-keeper, first seen in one of the works of Brueghel. The same goes for the Kindling-series that also refers to motives originally developed by Brueghel that Jankowski has developed further. In the dark, monochromatic colour palette the influence of the old masters is also recognisable. At the same time Michał Jankowski is an author of presentations born from large gestures with thin paint. He paints quickly and fiercely, yet very precisely. Realistically looking animal furs are nothing else but a couple of strokes of the brush. This brush would be more suitable for painting of walls.
As with Lynch, Jankowski´s mysteries cannot be fully solved. Jankowski reminds us, that (…)In a town like twin peaks no one is innocent**. The disquieting feeling of threat or anxiety that creeps up while looking at Michał Jankowski’s paintings presents a paradox as these feelings spring from human actions.

In Polish town Ludwikowice there is a building, from the time of the Second World War, which purpose is still unknown. One of the local theories states that it was used for the construction and testing of anti-gravity engines, needed for the spaceships, Haunebu and Vrill. If the Germans had finished these weapons in time, the fate of the world might have been different. It is said that towards the end of the war all prototypes of the spaceships were ready for mass production. At the end of 1945 they were supposedly evacuated to a German military base for submarines and ships in the Antarctic. Allegedly this part of the Antarctic had been occupied by the Germans since 1938 and was named Neu-Schwabenland.
Shortly after 1945, the American military supposedly sent troops on several missions, to the Antarctic (certainly not for the purpose of fighting penguins and seals).  It is said that Haunebu had been secured by the Americans in January 1947 during the operation High Jump. Several months afterwards information of a UFO crashing over Roswell, New Mexico ran through the U.S. media. If one proposes that the UFOs were the same German spaceship Haunebu, the whole story of a crashed over Roswell, starts to make sense. Especially since the military base at Roswell is the only base that housed bombers fit to transport atomic weapons and other highly secret projects. Seen from this perspective, it is also understandable why the American military continued to organise expeditions to the Antarctic, identified as operation Deepfreeze, until mid 1960s.
Hubert Czerepok refers to sources, which remain unsubstantiated and uses classical strategies of contemporary art: found footage and re-enactment to weave his story. He analyses the information found and strives to provide it with new meaning. Conspiracy theories appear repeatedly in his oeuvre. His work has already posed the existence of extraterrestrials, as well as explored secrets in the destruction of the WTC, apocalyptical theories and curses from the Middle Ages. He questions conventional interpretations, and infects history with a virus, weakening the traditional course of narration - it is his aim to construct ‘simulations of history’. His aim is not to contradict anyone or prove anything. He bluffs, he manipulates the viewer, and he wants to generate uncertainty. Just as one is never sure if what is commonly believed has in fact taken place, one must also question if what we think is absurd could only be fiction.
 

And even if his anecdotes do not illustrate any particular point, they are not deprived of truth. Their perverse philosophy is based on the fact that they do not pretend to be what they are not, remaining mere fragments of the recorded reality, with no intentions of explaining or exemplifying anything. In spite of that, they provide us with a glimpse of a future which cannot yet be imagined, a future, where objects will finally loose their raison d’être in favour of concepts, ideas or mental projects. Production of tangible objects has lost its importance. They are superfluous baggage from the past we will get rid of sooner or later. What matters today is a design of a new world. A mental change which will sweep the whole visible and tangible world onto a historical and technological waste heap – possibly including all that used to be of value and essence to ourselves. That is why the foundation of Piotr Jaros’s works consists of a common-sense dose of cynicism and calculation. The whole visible world requires redesigning, which for now is tantamount with confronting our desires.

The ZAK | BRANICKA Gallery dedicates a monographic exhibition to the photography of Zofia Kulik. These selected works give a representative insight in her oeuvre. For the first time the artist reveals the technical process behind her work, the guarded secret of her large-scale tableau’s: the stencils that she uses during the creation process will be exhibited alongside the finished work. The focus of the exhibition is the monumental work entitled, “Splendour of Myself V”  – elements from which are singled out and their meaning described in an accompanying  “guide” – an exemplary key to the manifold iconographic and art-historical references in Kulik’s work.