JAROSŁAW KOZŁOWSKI
25/11/2017 - 10/02/2018
Words and Colors
Opening: Friday, November 24, 2017, from 6 to 9 pm
The exhibition will run between November 25, 2017 and February 10, 2018
ŻAK | BRANICKA is delighted to present the exhibition Words and Colors with works by Jarosław Kozłowski – the artist’s first solo exhibition and likewise the beginning of his cooperation with the gallery.
« 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
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MARLENA KUDLICKA
16/09/2017 - 18/11/2017
Opening: Friday, 15 September, 2017 from 6 to 9pm
Elements of Peaceful Engagement
sugar in the ashes
Official Capacity
curated by Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk
ŻAK | BRANICKA is pleased to present in the frame of Berlin Art Week, the new solo show of Marlena Kudlicka Elements of Peaceful Engagement.
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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
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ROBERT KUśMIROWSKI
29/04/2017 - 09/09/2017
LINDENSTR. 35 BERLIN
Opening: Friday, April 28, 2017, 6 to 9pm
ŻAK | BRANICKA is pleased to present in the frame of Gallery Weekend, Robert Kuśmirowski’s Lindenstr. 35. On this occasion, the gallery’s traditional space will vanish, time will be shifted back about 80 years and history will be relived.
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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...
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JASMINA CIBIC
21/01/2017 - 08/04/2017
Firm Foundations
Opening: January 20, 2017 from 6pm to 9pm
ŻAK | BRANICKA is delighted to present
Firm Foundations by Jasmina Cibic, this will be the artist’s first solo presentation in Berlin and the beginning of her cooperation with the gallery.
«Cibic’s work seeks to establish dialogues between politically latent objects from diverse historical or linguistic and media spaces. Hers is a practice that addresses the ways in which visual language, art, architecture, and rhetoric are deployed and instrumentalised by political regimes, before investigating what happens to these fragments when the ideologies they endorse collapse.
Gathering together these symbols and iconographies, Cibic’s projects present a synthesis of gesture, stagecraft and re-enactment. Instantiated in films and installations, hers is also an ongoing performative practice, an ‘enacted’ exercise in the dissection of statecraft. Cibic plays a double-game, at once decoding mechanisms of power whilst building her own exemplary allegorical structures. Tracing lines through history, she undertakes detailed research of official state archives and hidden repositories of authority. The conventions, apologues and narratives she turns her forensic gaze upon are drawn from various players involved in the contrivances of power, working in concert to forge common visions of the nation.
Extending from the gallery window to cover almost half of the space’s walls is Cibic’s
The Land In Which a Wide Space For National Progress Is Ensured, a performative installation that alludes to the soft power strategies of art and architecture utilized by (trans)national political structures. A wallpaper composed of numerous photographic elements seamlessly stitched together depicts a fictitious monochrome landscape strewn with banners. This picturesque utopia is an amalgam of images taken by Josip Broz Tito’s personal photographers in an attempt to frame the emerging postwar Yugoslavia — artists in the service of the state whose images are necessarily implicated in a political aim despite their circumstantial nature.
The banners casually caught in the branches of this fantastical landscape bear quotations from a variety of affirmative political speeches pertaining to nation building. During the exhibition’s opening these slogans will be activated during a performance in which two costumed women gild the text in continuo, siting this iteration of the work firmly in its locale. The display of the same wall image in different spaces indirectly provokes reconsiderations of the contextual uniqueness of a certain space and poses the question whether that uniqueness is lost or enriched each time it is recast and displayed.
Superimposed over this prospect are a series of closely associated works — collages in which geometric abstractions are cut into pastoral photographs to reveal other landscapes behind. These images are also sourced from Tito’s archive, whilst the incised forms are drawn from unrealized designs for the decoration of Belgrade for the inaugural conference of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961. These ‘neoreadymades’ are purged of their original meaning and their identification. They are reduced to signifiers, which the artist utilises to build a new vocabulary that provokes a reconsideration of space and time, a clash of worlds — known and imaginary. These loaded abstractions extrapolate from the walls and are made concretely manifest on the floor in Assembly, a sculpture at once redolent of a minimalistic emptying of content, and diagrammatically suggestive of social organization.
Cibic’s video
The Pavilion presents a group of five female performers who assemble the model of the modernist Yugoslav pavilion presented at the 1929 Barcelona EXPO from individual parts on a theatre stage. Shot from various angles and perspectives, the performance of
building turns into visually seductive choreographic arabesques created by the performers in light-coloured overalls on the black floor of the stage. The action unfolds on an empty theatre stage and is accompanied by the voice of a female narrator who functions as the artist’s alter ego, adopting a documentary tone to describe the methodology and the process of reconstruction of
the disappeared pavilion. Focusing on the striped façade of the object, as an architectural concept which aims to seduce the viewer, Cibic analyses the implementation of this visual language outside the realm of architecture, presenting this part of her exploration through illustrations featuring objects that she used as a basis for the pavilion’s reconstruction. Nearby lean three heavy sculptural rings, reminiscent in both material and form of the architectural ironwork of institutional gates and fences. Each bears an aphoristic phrase from a different ideologue speaking on the subject of ideal architecture (Thatcher; Khrushchev; and Truman), whose words repeat in an endless cycle, fixed in this arcane form of production. Taken together, the works that make up
Firm Foundations gesture towards the latent performative potential of props, backgrounds and scenographic elements drawn from the history of modern nation building. By turning the exhibition space into an expanded film or theatrical set, Cibic draws parallels between the construction of national culture and its use-value for political aims, embedding historical references and ready-mades as diverse as nationally representative aesthetics, architecture and cultural propaganda.
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RYSZARD WASKO
29/10/2016 - 14/01/2017
Who's Afraid of Colour? (Positive vs. Negative)
ŻAK | BRANICKA is delighted to present Who’s Afraid Of Colour (Positive vs. Negative) by Ryszard Wasko, marking this as his third exhibition at the gallery.
« 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.
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3/1/1
10/09/2016 - 22/10/2016
Artists: Marlena Kudlicka; Diogo Pimentão; Ignacio Uriarte
« 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.
3/1/1’s initial point of departure is the international standard of paper sizes, i.e., the formats of the A series. Though perceived by many as an auto-generative, even transcendental height-to-width ratio, the international paper size system is an outcome of a particular historical constellation taking us back to Germany 1922, when the German Institute for Standardization published DIN 476, the standard that introduced the A series paper sizes, which was only adopted in 1975 as the international standard ISO 216. For Kudlicka, Uriarte and Pimentão,
3/1/1 begins with the historicization and relativization of the standard of the A series, up to a point where, rather than universal and timeless, it is received as a contingent result of contingent conditions.
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.
Text by Ory Dessau
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KWIEKULIK
28/04/2016 - 30/07/2016
The Monument Without a Passport
ŻAK | BRANICKA is proud to present, in the frame of Gallery Weekend Berlin 2016, a solo exhibition by the artist duo KwieKulik (Przemysław Kwiek, Zofia Kulik), titled The Monument Without a Passport.
«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.
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HRISTINA IVANOSKA & YANE CALOVSKI
16/01/2016 - 23/04/2016
Orphans of Culture, Legends and Heroes Part II
« 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)
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SZYMON KOBYLARZ
14/11/2015 - 09/01/2016
Fibonacci Chaos«
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.
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RYSZARD WASKO
17/09/2015 - 07/11/2015
Time Sculptures – Conceptual Work from the 1980s.
On the occasion of the Berlin Art Week 2015, ŻAK | BRANICKA is pleased to present a selection of unknown works by Ryszard Wasko, conceptual artist. After Time Frames – Conceptual Works of the 1970s, Time Sculptures – Conceptual Works of the 1980s is the artist’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. It calls to mind the diversity of recently rediscovered art of the 1980s. The works shown in the exhibition are concerned with sculptures that deal with the ideas of time and space in how we perceive structure from different points of reference.
« For Wasko, the transformation that took place in his art from the 1970s to the 1980s is tantamount to a shift from video and photography to sculpture and painting: during this period, he extensively tested the boundaries of the different media. In his private life as well this was a time of great change. Immediately after his participation in the famous
Pier + Ocean show at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1980, he organized the legendary exhibition
Construction in Process in Łódź, Poland, which was described by Richard Nonas as an event “that happens only once in a generation”. The years that followed were very intense for him politically. Eventually he emigrated, first to England, and then to Berlin, where he received a scholarship of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Later, he came to realize that he had considered his earlier artistic activities as a kind of battle, whereas the Berlin years had brought him artistic freedom.
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.
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THE ADMIRABLE NUMBER PI (GROUP SHOW)
27/06/2015 - 12/09/2015
Artists: Daniel Buren, Stanisław Dróżdż, Jan Dibbets, Vlatka Horvat, Marlena Kudlicka, KwieKulik, Szymon Kobylarz, Mario Merz, Ryszard Wasko
KwieKulik, Siewierz - A Plate and Activities with Mercury, 1975
« ŻAK | BRANICKA is delighted to present
The Admirable Number Pi, a group show whose title was inspired by a poem by Nobel-Prize-winner Wisława Szymborska. The exhibition includes artists from two generations: pioneers of the conceptual movements of the 1960s and 70s (such as Buren, Dróżdż, Dibbets, KwieKulik, Merz, Wasko) and artists of the younger generation (Horvat, Kudlicka, Kobylarz).
The exhibition focuses on infinity, which in Szymborska's ironic, though deeply philosophical poem is symbolized by the Pi symbol:
“(...)The pageant of digits comprising the number pi
doesn't stop at the page's edge.
It goes on across the table, through the air,
over a wall, a leaf, a bird's nest, clouds, straight into the sky,
through all the bottomless, bloated heavens.(...)”
A longing for infinity and to catch the fleeting moment appears in the work of an icon of Polish concrete poetry, Stanisław Dróżdż.
In Date of my Birthday, (1975) Dróżdż put various numbers after the date 15.05.1939, as if seeking to narrow the event down to the microsecond. The chain of random digits loses its original significance and becomes a metaphor for the infinity of time. Things are much the same in his
Continuum (1973), which stretches the limits of mathematics to where it blends with philosophy.
Vlatka Horvat also measures infinity. In the
For Infinite Distance (2011) sculpture she shapes out of old-fashioned wooden rulers the slender, flowing sideways figure eight (the mathematical symbol for infinity: ∞). The rulers hop in zigzags, get the hiccups, unable to find where they began measuring, and so everything begins all over again… infinitely. Until they finally discover that the meaning of infinity's existence is that every centimeter forward takes them further away from the goal. This is much like traveling towards the horizon, which Jan Dibbets strives to reach in his photographs
Sea Horizon of 1973. Dibbets plays with perspective: his focus is on reality and illusion, on what truly exists in nature, what the human eye sees, and what geometry and perspective presume. Ryszard Wasko draws from the same idea in his work
Hypothetical Checkpoint Charlie (1988). In his drawings, based on a process of geometric analysis, he deconstructs a photo of Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin until the site becomes no more than an assortment of straight lines.
Back in the 1960s, the main representative of Arte Povera, Mario Merz, proved that nature is the creator of Mathematics. The drawing
Igloo (1970) is devoted to his fascination for the Fibonacci sequence and its infinity. The question arises: Does Nature repeat the rules of Mathematics, or the other way around, does Mathematics recreate the rules of Nature? It is a question that reminds us of another one: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Szymon Kobylarz builds the ideal trees whose shapes are based on a digitally generated fractal image. The artist assumes the role of the skilled carpenter, bringing them to life by his own hand. The KwieKulik duo also conforms certain mathematical and logical operations to art in their work titled
Siewierz – A Plate and Activities with Mercury of 1975. The artists shape drops of mercury falling from a shattered thermometer into patterns that illustrate set theory, hypothetical atom structures or planetary systems. This work next to many other KwieKulik projects, and according to the artists, proofs that the limited number of spatial relationships between objects (ten basic relations) can produce an infinite number of Aesthetic Time-Effects.
The Admirable Number Pi is a duel with numbers, words, and pictures, where nature comes out on top. The tears mathematicians have shed for the “imperfect perfection” of numbers are dried by the sighs of artists delighting in the precision of words and errors. In the works from her series
A Divided Dot, Marlena Kudlicka is fascinated by error and the point as a mathematical and typographical construct. The artist analyzes the spatial relationships of a point, despite the fact that, from a geometrical perspective, it is an infinitely small space, a place devoid of dimensions. How far does infinity reach if we cannot even ascertain where it begins?
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MAGDALENA ABAKANOWICZ
30/04/2015 - 04/05/2015
As part of the Gallery Weekend Berlin 2015, ŻAK | BRANICKA is proud to present, for the first time in this magnitude in Berlin, a solo presentation by Magdalena Abakanowicz (b. 1930) at St. Elisabeth Church.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is a monumental installation titled Bambini, consisting of 83 life-sized sculptures, which was shown in venues such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (1999), the Jardins du Palais Royal in Paris (1999), or the Reina Sofia in Madrid (2008). The show will also include the works from the series Backs, Bella I and Bella II. Further works can be seen at the gallery space in Lindenstraße 35.
Location: St. Elisabeth Church,
Invalidenstr. 3,
10115 Berlin
Exhibition: April 30 – May 4, 2015, 11–7 pm
AGNIESZKA POLSKA | THE BODY OF WORDS
30/04/2015 - 20/06/2015
As part of the Gallery Weekend Berlin 2015, ŻAK | BRANICKA is pleased to announce The Body of Words, a solo-exhibition by Agnieszka Polska: an emerging artist from the younger generation, who is rapidly growing in the contemporary art scene.
The artist’s visual language is unique and unprecedented: seen once, her style will always be recognized again. The source materials for most of her non-narrative video pieces are pictures from books and stock photographs, which she animates in order to create an absorbing, hypnotic atmosphere. In her films and collages of recent years, Polska has often addressed the issues of responsibility and social influence of the artist and further was examining various stances of the processes of legitimization or exclusion: in the field of art history, history as such, language and consciousness.
VLATKA HORVAT | IMMEASURABLES
13/02/2015 - 18/04/2015
ŻAK | BRANICKA is pleased to present Immeasurables, the second solo exhibition by Vlatka Horvat charting exciting new territory in her work.
Investigating the politics and poetics of spatial arrangement, order and organization, interpersonal and social relations, Vlatka Horvat’s practice explores the characteristics of interaction between the body, the built environment and the objects that inhabit it. In her collages, photographs and installations, Horvat often places the body in awkward, puzzling and uncanny positions, situating it on the horizon of objecthood – a move which questions the stability of categories and structures through which social and political meaning is made. Whilst the body in Horvat’s work is repeatedly depicted as disjointed and discombobulated, situated between functional and dysfunctional, between subject and object, the space in which it performs its often absurdist and Dadaist operations, is itself ‘out of joint’.
«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, all converge into a puzzling and uncanny field of new special and temporal becomings.
At the centre of the gallery’s main space, Horvat presents a selection of new wall-based collage works The Past is Another Country 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 mother as young adult–through a set of sophisticated, formal gestures, suggests an almost infantile attempt of evicting the intergenerational transfer of the sense of loss and disillusionment. Using a series of cutting and folding gestures, the artist sometimes removes all context and surroundings around the figure, leaving it suspended in the midst of empty frames. At other times Horvat folds the figure outside the edges of the photograph, or outside the edges of the paper itself.
The relation between the sides and the middle similarly comes to the fore in the sculptural work Peripheral Awareness, in which a range of round or tubular objects are placed at the very edges of a table, precariously stopped at the table’s brink, apparently caught at a precipice. The safety of the middle and the stability of the centre are abandoned here for a more precarious space of the edge, and the possibility of the objects “going over the edge” (in both literal and metaphorical sense) hangs in the air. As is the case with Horvat’s collages, in Peripheral Awareness, the safe center also becomes a site of abandonment–evacuated and deserted –while the edges become sites of activity, enlivened with the presence of objects/figures occupying it, but which are displaced and stopped in a precarious balance between stability and the potential fall.
The walls around the sculptural works hold Spread Pages, Horvat’s delicate reworkings of the surface of A4 paper. Here the artist again applies a formally consistent process of cutting and folding their surfaces, expanding them outwards from their one-time boundaries to create a constellation of Moebius-like geometrical conundrums. In this process, basic blank pages are dismantled as solid flat-plane surfaces to become problematic three-dimensional artifacts whose borders, edges, and interior dimensions are constantly an issue. While much of Horvat’s work to date has subjected a human figure to gestures such as cutting and severing, recombining and reconfiguring, here the focus shifts to the reconfiguration of an object, to negotiation and distribution of space itself, to the possibilities of occupying it, and of re-drawings its borders. In the spatial redefinition and literal unpacking of this everyday object–the page–and in the repeated flux/reversal of outside and inside, Spread Pages evokes the social and political movements of territorial expansion and conquest, and the psychological processes of interior revelation and exploration.
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PAWEL KSIAZEK | FIGURES
31/10/2014 - 31/01/2015
ŻAK | BRANICKA gallery is proud to present the third solo exhibition by Paweł Książek, titled
Figures.
The word "figure" derives from the Latin language; it can be abbreviated as "fig." or symbolised by the Greek letter "φ", which refers to the figure, can be a symbol of luminous flux as well as golden ratio. Paweł Książek uses this ambiguity as the starting point for his new series of paintings entitled
Figures.
«Paweł Książek is a painter – an analyst. His paintings cannot be traced back to an emotional source, but rather are a result of a process of research. The artist’s strategy relies on the analysis of visual sources as in his previous series of paintings (for example,
NN vs. Artists). In
Figures the available raw materials (including photographs depicting different phenomena or people coming from visual arts, pop culture, movies or the internet) are collected by the artist. Książek then, classifies and processes them through the medium of painting. In this way, Książek directly refers to the methodology developed by Aby Warburg, based on the building of iconographic atlases and their comparative analysis.
« [pdf - `Press release` 141.35 KB]

DOMINIK LEJMAN | DIS/CONNECTED
18/09/2014 - 25/10/2014
ŻAK | BRANICKA gallery is proud to present the third solo exhibition by Dominik Lejman, titled dis/connected.
Dominik Lejman's art work has its roots in traditional painting, but goes far beyond its limits. With his unique technique, Lejman combines painting and video projections. In this way, the artist introduces the factor of time to the painting: “painting with time code.” His murals - or "video- frescoes" - also derive from old painting traditions. These are wall compositions, in which, instead of paint, Lejman uses light projected directly on walls, buildings, or in the public space.
«The exhibition in ŻAK | BRANICKA reflects upon the issues addressed in Lejman's most recent works, and stresses more than ever the position of the artist as critically and politically "dis/connected." Lejman criticizes the stance of political art: “What do I think of the artist's role in being able to make political commentaries?” He believes that he has no ability to change the world. He feels powerless and disconnected, which allows him to use mass media images differently.
In the works shown in the dis/connected exhibition we find motifs of conflicts or armed operations from various parts of the world, which Lejman reduces to media ornaments, as in his painting Black Dandelions (2011). This abstraction of events makes them more universal, as they could be happening anywhere – they are no longer tied to a specific place. "I believe that comments on political and social issues become more visible when resurfaced from their original context." Lejman considers art to be an option for detachment and distancing, though this does not mean that the surrounding reality does not concern him.
The exhibition's main installation is Lejman's latest work, a three-channel video-fresco titled Fencing (2014). Layers of wire fence gradually enfold the walls of the gallery. The projections overlap until everything dissolves in light and vanishes. Fencing metaphorically protects the viewer from the world, and simultaneously closes him in a trap. It turns our attention to the invisible, virtual, social and political barriers, which are far more painful than the physical barriers from the past.
In another work, Bubblewrapped Philosophy (2014), the viewer is confronted with the faces of contemporary philosophers, lecturing upon current political, social and cultural issues, each of whom is trapped in a bubble of sorts. The philosophers propound their theories, but none of them can be heard: there is no chance here for dialogue. Is this not how we often feel in today's world? How far do we affect it, and how far do we remain anonymous?
The dis/connected exhibition is to be accompanied by a new publication, Painting with Timecode, published in English by Hatje Cantz and the ŻAK | BRANICKA Foundation (2014).
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ZOFIA KULIK | INSTEAD OF SCULPTURE - SEQUENCES 1968-71
02/05/2014 - 13/09/2014
For this year’s Gallery Weekend Berlin ŻAK | BRANICKA is delighted to present an exhibition by Zofia Kulik, entitled Instead of Sculpture – Sequences 1968-71. This exhibition is a double "return" for the artist: a return to her solo work after several years spent working on the archive and publishing a monumental monograph dedicated to the artistic duo KwieKulik , and also a return to her earliest artistic explorations; to her graduation work created in 1970/71 at the Sculpture Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. This project has not seen the light of day for over four and a half decades, and was never finally edited. Selected fragments from this work will be presented for the first time as a photo sequences at ŻAK | BRANICKA.
«During her studies, Zofia Kulik was always carrying a camera, constantly recording reality and setting up objects, models, and finding situations, which she then photographed. Her interest shifted from the material, static sculpture-object to an analysis of the dynamic spectator-object relationship.
A fundamental part of Zofia Kulik's work was a slide show made of around 500 photos, and a theoretical component entitled Film as Sculpture, Sculpture as Film—a kind of map of references, quotes, and personal reflections organized in a way that resembles a contemporary hypertext. In this text Kulik researched the relationships between the sculpture and the viewer, and the process of creating a sculpture in the viewer's perception. She wrote: “What is film? Space in time. What is sculpture? Space in time. What’s the difference? Film is sculpture but in a linear form (of the film frames). The form is defined not by the process of coding but the process of restitution (playing back): the permanent flat screen always equidistant from the viewer. A series of pictures appears on the screen. This series is nothing other than a series of profiles carved out of matter.”
Kulik's sculptural and photo activities, as well as her theoretical writings, which equate the creative process with the reception of a work, paved the way for a radical reformulation of the definition of sculpture and justified the making of sculpture projects using non-traditional media, such as film and photography. From today's perspective it turns out that, in parallel with international artists of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Kulik had carried out all the postulates of the definition of new sculpture as described a decade later in Rosalind E. Krauss's famous essay Sculpture in the Expanded Field: that sculpture is defined by excluding those things which are not sculpture, combining landscape and not-landscape, or using photography with reference to marked sites. Krauss wrote: “But in addition to actual physical manipulations of sites, this term [marked site] also refers to other forms of marking. These might operate through the application of impermanent marks […] or through the use of photography.”
Kulik's artistic method even went a step further. If the viewer and the perception process are inextricable parts of the sculpture, it is logical that time is also a component of the sculpture. For Kulik, therefore, a sculpture is a process in time, with no precise beginning or end, with no concrete narrative or history. For this reason, instead of sculpture, her method was to choose photo sequences taken whilst working on materials, models' bodies, and found objects. The processual and visual aspects were very important to her: she used impermanent and readily available materials—crepe paper, colored paper, and fabrics—from which she made abstract compositions with pop-art color schemes. Their aim was to perform intellectual operations on pictures, and to explore visual forms. She consciously abandoned film as a medium in order to keep the viewer from focusing on the plot.
All the motifs and creative strategies that Zofia Kulik used from 1968 onward (such as documentation as a part of the artistic strategy or exposing the relationship between the work, the creative process and the documentation) were developed later in the methodology of KwieKulik. This duo, in which she worked with Przemysław Kwiek from 1970 to 1987, was one of the most important groups of the Polish neo-avant-garde. Although Zofia Kulik has been working solo since 1987, her present work continues her explorations from before KwieKulik came into being. She concentrates on photography by creating multiple-exposed black-and-white photographs from numerous small pictures, collected over years in her photo archive.
Zofia Kulik’s work was exposed to a wider audience during documenta 12 (2007) in Kassel and at the 47th Biennale di Venezia (1997).
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MICHAł JANKOWSKI | GOOD NIGHT
27/06/2014 - 13/09/2014
ŻAK | BRANICKA is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by Michal Jankowski under the title Good Night. The exhibition will take place in the gallery's showroom.
Michał Jankowski takes the viewer on a phantasmagorical journey to a world in which subconscious thoughts are brought to the surface and left uncensored. In their morbidity, ambiguity and incredible tactility, the artistʼs works evoke a series of sensations when viewed over a period of time. Jankowski pushes his subjects to the limits of their legibility as images, whilst at the same time building bridges to entirely new worlds of interpretation; each uniquely constructed for, and essentially by, every new observer.
«The exhibition Good Night showcases a selection of Jankowskiʼs most recent works, which in contrast to his previous series of paintings, consists exclusively of collage pieces. The artistʼs personal memories, declinations of eventualities, literary allusions and private tragedies are all grafted onto a dictionary of visual references. The use of collage is key in enabling Jankowski to transform ordinary subject matter into almost abstract representations; bodies are segmented and imaginatively reassembled into unnatural and often unnerving hybrid creations, deprived of their former individual qualities. In the words of the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy: Bodies, in the end, are also that – head and tail: the very discreteness of the sites of sense, of the moments of an organism, of the elements of matter. The body is a place that opens, displaces and spaces phallus and cep hale: making room for them to create an event (rejoicing, suffering, thinking, being born, dying, sexing, laughing, sneezing, trembling, weeping, forgetting…).1
The influence of the Old Masters, although more apparent in Jankowskiʼs earlier paintings, is still identifiable in the subject matter and form of Jankowskiʼs collage compositions. More significant in Good Night, however, are the references made to Surrealist artworks and ideas; these are expressed in the unnatural combinations of elements found in Stroke (2012) and Cream Pie (2012), for example, as well as in the allusions made to dreams – a recurring theme of the exhibition. The Pyjama works (2014), with their irrational juxtaposition of sinister belt restraints and childish patterns, can be understood as an expression of the unconscious, involuntary and unfiltered, as in a dream.
Whilst on the one hand Jankowskiʼs incongruous imagery evokes Surrealismʼs bizarre narratives, his works simultaneously subtly question modernismʼs tendency toward abstraction. The end result is a “contemporary surrealism”, which challenges our reliance on language and its attendant need for reasoned apprehension. With his collage figures, Jankowski recomposes his own “physiology” of the world, before or after any attempt at verbalisation. It is a stopping, a deviating of the descent of the discourse by tearing the signs away from their denotative value. What they now say is precisely the intermediate, the uncertain and the unnamable. They speak a constantly extended secret that prevents the subject from fulfilling its destiny by merging with a predicate.
1 Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, translated into English by Richard Rand, Fordham University Press: New York, US, 2008.
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JOANNA RAJKOWSKA | GOLD, SILVER, BRASS
14/03/2014 - 26/04/2014
A recurring theme in Joanna Rajkowska's works is collective memory. This is often central to her works in public spaces, for example, Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue (2002, Warsaw), or Benjamin in Konya (2010, Turkey). Rajkowska sometimes uses private mythologies in her work, which in her interpretation become a universal story.
The exhibition Gold, Silver, Brass includes works created by Rajkowska over the past six years. The starting point is the artist's family history – an ordinary bourgeois family from Warsaw, their story similar to that of thousands of other families, which together shaped the identity of Eastern Europe and its collective memory in the 20th century.
Joanna Rajkowska's works are an invocation of the past. Beneath the superficiality of everyday life the artist reveals layers of memory and touches the wounds of the past, from which we all bear scars.
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RYSZARD WASKO | TIME FRAMES - CONCEPTUAL WORK FROM THE 70S.
17/01/2014 - 08/03/2014
Ryszard Wasko is a legendary figure in Polish conceptual art. His role as an artist cannot be divorced from his role as a curator and organizer of some of the most important art events behind the Iron Curtain. Over thirty years after his last international show at Museum Folkwang in Essen (1981), ŻAK | BRANICKA has the honor of presenting
a selection of the artist's works from the 1970s.
The 1970s were a key period for Wasko. As a member of Warsztat Formy Filmowej [Film Form Studio] (1970-1976) tied to Łódzka Szkoła Filmowa [Film School in Łódź] (whose other members included Paweł Kwiek, Józef Robakowski, and Zbigniew Rybczyński), Wasko concentrated on the conceptual analysis of the medium: at this time he created films, video art, photographs, installations, and drawings in which time, space, movement, and perception were the main subjects. These elements were analytically broken down into their basic components, allowing the artist to deconstruct the medium: photography and video.

NATALIA STACHON | THE PROBLEM OF THE CALM
01/11/2013 - 11/01/2014
You are cordially invited to the exhibition opening on Friday, November 1, 2013 from 6 to 9 pm.
ŻAK | BRANICKA is delighted to present the first solo exhibition of the artist Natalia Stachon entitled The Problem of the Calm. The young artist investigates the relationships of space and matter, sensory impressions and experience, form and surface in her works. In the process, the site of art morphs into a stage, habitual conceptions of image are overruled or reinterpreted.
The eponymous work is an installation conceived specially for ŻAK | BRANICKA that completely takes up the space. Stainless steel cables, with different formations of glass insulators and stainless steel elements hanging from their ends, stretch from one wall to another. The materials are reminiscent of high-voltage power lines; defunctionalized as weights they generate a new sort of tension, in which the cables regroup to form a space-encompassing design.
“Places find me. And they change me. It is always a journey with an unknown outcome.”
«Stachon’s work depends on these kinds of contradictions, from a critical view of inherent meanings that change with the slightest shift/displacement and can create new ones. In the process the individual works engage with one another, thereby never appearing autarchic/self-sufficient and closed, but rather becoming part of an open and alterable spatial scene.
The second part of the exhibition composes new pencil drawings from the series Untitled. These precisely executed drawings show distorted and stranded ship containers whose origin and story the artist consciously obscures by omitting logos and placing white surfaces on the paper. Stachon succeeds also here in reducing things to the essential.
“I have aversion to everything that is finished, completed, absolute and total. I don’t believe in the idea of a concluded, autarchic work of art. Because it’s just not that way in my life. For that reason I work in series and variants. Every work originates from a previous one. They refer to each other and are connected among themselves. For that reason I prefer modular systems. Conditions, actions. Everything that you can staple, bundle up, hang, and pile up. They generate first an alleged order, but in fact their differences are still contained: their deconstruction, transformation, destruction. My works reside exactly in between. In transition between becoming and vanishing. […] In the exhibitions my paper works can function like initial sparks. Out of the intimate observation the viewer rotates again in the room and proceeds on his path through the exhibition and to think about the event further. And is maybe at first disoriented? But in these moments of loss and disorientation, where the subconsciously assumed, the acquired, are interrupted without forewarning, he asks himself possible questions: How does this all go together? Where am I? When he looks for questions and finds them in the quiet, he is right in the middle of it. The space, the viewer and my art are in dialogue. In this way the space becomes a living body in the perception. An alterable splendor.” (Natalia Stachon, October, 2013)
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SZYMON KOBYLARZ | ART FOR ART´S SAKE
20/09/2013 - 26/10/2013
You are cordially invited to the exhibition opening on Friday, September 20, 2013 from 6 to 10 pm.
ŻAK | BRANICKA is thrilled to present the second solo show at the gallery by Szymon Kobylarz, titled Art for Art’s Sake.
The idea for his latest project was born in 2011, when Kobylarz made the "Magazynier" [Storehouse Attendant] installation at Kronika Gallery in Bytom. He used some of his previous works in constructing it, dismantling and reusing them as building materials. This sort of recycling or utilization of art was not only a way of cleaning out his storeroom, but also expressed a doubt of sorts: “I wonder about the sense in physically producing works of art,” says Kobylarz.
«He knows from experience that art chiefly exists in the social consciousness as reproductions, and that the dark visions of Walter Benjamin's "Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" have been fully rendered—if not surpassed.
It is from these doubts precisely that his latest series has come about: "Art for Art's Sake". The title pertains to the nineteenth-century concept of "l’art pour l’art" introduced by the French literary group known as the Parnassians. This concept, stating that art ought to serve no aims other than itself, was swiftly adopted by art criticism.
"Art for Art's Sake" is a series of pictures depicting the interiors of exhibitions that never took place. This happened for various reasons: either they were too expensive or too difficult to execute, or even, from a technical point of view, impossible to stage. There are also those that would have been simply too boring. None of this means that these exhibitions should be utterly forgotten. How beautiful are gallery interiors covered in dust, how melancholy is a museum with a labyrinth of empty showcases? And what if natural phenomena could be enclosed in a gallery space: a rainbow, aurora polaris or St. Elmo's fire?
Szymon Kobylarz was born in Świętochłowice in 1981. He lives and works in Katowice. After his studies at the Academy oft he Arts in Katowice (2002–2007) he was awarded by the director of BWA gallery for Contemporary Art in Wrocław within the framework oft he renowned Geppert-Award in 2009. Kobylarz’ work Nose Punch Machine is on show together with works by Marcel Duchamp, Peter Fischli/David Weiss, and Bruce Nauman amongst others as part oft the group exhibition Slapstick! at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg until February 2, 2014. A catalogue accompanying the series Art for Art’s Sake will be published in English and Polish in September 2013.
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MARLENA KUDLICKA | THE WEIGHT OF 8
21/06/2013 - 14/09/2013
You are cordially invited to the exhibition opening on Friday, June 21, 2013 from 6 to 9 pm.
ŻAK | BRANICKA Gallery is pleased to present the weight of 8, our first exhibition of Marlena Kudlicka's work. Specially prepared for the gallery space, the artist has created an installation consisting of three objects along with a narrative, the key to which is the title of the exhibit. The weight of 8 is a description of the relationship between space and language. The artist says that "Letters and words serve to describe a space, while numbers do the same for its measurements. Words are not, however, capable of precisely expressing something, as they constitute a subjective evaluation, yet numbers code precision. I join both forms in a new language."
«The first component of
the weight of 8 is an installation constructed of metal letters and numbers. It looks like a piece of DIN A4 paper that has been proportionally enlarged to fit the height of the display space, but, due to a coding error, all of the characters have been garbled, creating an abstract visual composition. The second component is a hanging sculpture that was created based on the exact measurements of the dimensions of the gallery. It is a kind of abstract "algorithm" that visualizes mathematical operations, without describing them with characters or numbers. The sculpture is made of metal elements of varying thickness and is based on the principle of counterpoint: the weight of some elements is distributed to the exterior with the help of other elements. The steel object that connects the first two components has two meanings. The first comes from mathematics (statistical calculations), as the object has the shape of an enlarged I-beam, the load bearing construction element that was introduced into architecture by Mies van der Rohe. The second meaning comes from language: the cross section of the object is simply a large letter "I" and it carries specific semantic meanings: in Polish it means "and"; in English "I"; and it is also the Roman numeral 1.
All of the pieces of the installation are based on the relationship between letters, numbers, and punctuation, as well as matter and its weight. Everything is important here, including the thickness and type of materials, and the finish. Even the color is derived from mathematical calculations. So, what does the "eight" in the title weigh (estimated visually), and what is its color? In order to calculate them, it is enough to read the title-equation out loud: the letter "w" is present in the first word, but not the second. A proportion of 50% black to 50% white gives us the gray.
Kudlicka is particularly interested in the relationship between precision and error: her sculptures are made with a jeweler's precision, but at the same time an error is factored into the process of their creation. This relationship leads to a balance—the main theme of the exhibition—not only between, for example, numbers and the written word, or dimensions and color, but also the balance of weights. Her sculptures are based on statistical calculations, which is why they seem to float on air, and why we doubt the force of gravity when looking at them, or walk around them on tiptoes.
Kudlicka's work follows in the tradition of constructivist art. Just as Katarzyna Kobro, the forerunner of Polish avant-garde art, she also derives her sculptures from architecture. Kudlicka says that "In this project I refer to the peripheral areas of architecture, as well as to the construction process. My inspiration was a trip to Beirut and the suburbs of Cairo, but also the 1970s in my native Poland, where, in a situation of constant systemic political change, temporariness and a lack of stability were a permanent part of architecture. Most often this was a result of improvisation and limited access to building materials; so this whole temporary architecture became a 'monument of errors.' In illegally erected buildings, construction elements that leaned on each other were balanced in accordance with the principle of counterpoint. Of course this was all inevitably predestined to be fragile, and this interested me the most. In what way does fragility activate a space? Does it play a primary or secondary role? Why are certain places felt to be weak points, or can fragility, perhaps, be seen as a temporary state between instability and scarcity on the one hand, and effectiveness and function on the other?"
Language is also a key element in Kudlicka's work; the title is always an integral part of her art. Friedrich Meschede writes that "Focusing on the title reveals a crucial core of Marlena Kudlicka’s work. She refers to concrete poetry, a term that can be ascribed to both literature and the fine arts, which transforms the flowing transitions between the medium of language, its visualization using letters as a pictorial form, and sounds as concepts of rhythm into a complex system. The rigid guidelines of grammar turn into a new order through a playful disregard of grammatical regularity. The combinatorics of opposites, and elements that would not initially be thought of as going together, is the technique of collage used for concrete poetry. The vocabulary of construction creates the surprise."
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VALIE EXPORT: BILDER DER BERÜHRUNG [IMAGES OF CONTINGENCE]
26/04/2013 - 15/06/2013
VALIE EXPORT, Fragmente der Bilder einer Berührung, 1994, installation, installation view, ŻAK | BRANICKA, 2013
© VALIE EXPORT
Opening April 26, 2013, 6 to 9 pm in the frame of Gallery Weekend Berlin 2013
Opening times during Gallery Weekend Berlin 2013: Saturday and Sunday from 11 am to 7 pm
Screening of METANOIA: 29 videos by VALIE EXPORT June 6, 11 am to 9 pm
ŻAK | BRANICKA is delighted to present Bilder der Berührung [Images of Contingence], an exhibition of works by VALIE EXPORT to be shown during the Gallery Weekend Berlin 2013. The exhibition highlights the artist’s groundbreaking expressions of physical contact and its implications in various media, including installation, drawing, photography, film and archival materials. The title of the exhibition is rooted in VALIE EXPORT’s installation work Fragmente der Bilder einer Berührung [Fragments of Images of Contingence] of 1994, in which pole- and wire-hung light bulbs are rhythmically immersed into cylinders filled with milk, used oil, or water. These liquids are fundamental sources of our existence. At the same time, their physical fusion with electricity implies a life-threatening danger—a contradictory, yet also mutually conditioned state of joining and repelling. The rhythmic movement in this work is repeated in a second installation of the exhibition, Die un-endliche/-ähnliche Melodie der Stränge [The un-ending/-ique melody of cords] of 1998, a recording of a threadless sewing machine and its sound.
«Contingency, liminality, and sensual experience likewise permeate the artist’s video works as themes, a selection of which will also be shown, including one of her most famous works, TAPP- und TASTKINO [TOUCH CINEMA] (the Munich performance of 1969). During this performance, the artist wore an aluminium box around her naked chest, allowing passersby to enter her miniature cinema as visitors with their hands. “To see the film, that is, in this case, to touch and feel it, the viewer (user) has to guide his hands through the entrance into the screening hall. With this, the curtain, previously only raised for the eyes, is now finally raised for both hands. The tactile reception takes a stand against the deception of voyeurism. For, as long as the citizen satisfies himself with the reproduced copy of sexual freedom, the state remains spared from the sexual revolution”, EXPORT states. In its confrontation and appropriation of the male gaze, this iconic performance has become a symbol of feminist art.
The motif of touch reappears in VALIE EXPORT’s series of drawings dating from the beginning of the 1970s. Depicting hands that protect or caress, hands that suffer, and hands that create suffering, these works, as all others, configure an iconographic index of the human body, and particularly a woman’s body; the individual parts of which inscribe and are inscribed with meaning. Its capacity for “touch” is most telling: It is testimony not only to sensuality, intimacy, and carnality, but also to aggression and violence. As EXPORT says: “For me, contingence is how and where you perceive borders, and how and where and when borders explode.”
Aside from the aforementioned works, various photographs and display cases showing archive material and documentation from EXPORT’s long-standing artistic career (specifically compiled for the exhibition VALIE EXPORT – Archive at the Kunsthaus Bregenz in 2011) will complement the exhibition. «

KATARZYNA KOZYRA: LOOKING FOR JESUS
09/03/2013 - 13/04/2013
Opening March 8, 2013, 6 to 9 pm
Text by Hanna Wróblewska, director of Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw
Looking for Jesus is the latest project by Katarzyna Kozyra, a project in the making, beginning over a year ago, and continuing its creation for at least a few more months. This time, Kozyra assumes the position of a researcher, allowing us—the audience, the press, the public—to be interested in her works: into the formation process of the work, the subsequent stages of editing, tracking the film or rather video installation, from the very beginning of its creation.
The project was produced with the support of Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland and a private collector.
«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?
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GORGONA: PLEASE ATTEND
18/01/2013 - 02/03/2013
In 1961, Gorgona fled from the then powerful communism into the irrational, the incomprehensible. The inactivity of Gorgona was noticeable. Several young people whose mutual affection was the decisive connective factor met occasionally. Gorgona did not have any messages! It was a particular type of activity, auto-ironic, affording a feeling of being unusual. Perhaps it brought something new; perhaps it only resolved its life problems, feelings of being hemmed in. Perhaps it left nothing behind apart from friendship and spiritual closeness.
Josip Vaništa
ŻAK | BRANICKA is delighted to present its first exhibition by the proto-conceptual Zagreb-based group Gorgona that unrealised itself between 1959 and 1966.
«Josip Vaništa (1924), Julije Knifer (1924-2004), Radoslav Putar (1929-1994), Marijan Jevšovar (1922-1998), Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos (1921-1987), Matko Meštrović (1933), Ivan Kožarić (1921), Đuro Seder (1927) and Miljenko Horvat (1935-2012) occasionally met, talked, corresponded, exchanged “thoughts for the coming months” among themselves, sent one another “homework” and “questionnaires”, went on “inspection tours of the seasons”, organised exhibitions in a glazier’s shop they called “Studio G”, published the anti-magazine Gorgona, arranged themselves, performed group- and auto-choreographed movements, set up, posed and photographed. All of the above was permeated with humour, wit and paradox, modelled by taking over the terminology and the form of the society they had isolated themselves from through their activities. Initially, the group name had come from one of the Mangelos’ poems, not the Tuscan Archipelago island, but they later discovered this link and incorporated it into their work. Eliciting productions and collaborations both non-material and material gave the group an outlet to the Post-WWII “universe without purpose” in what Vaništa has concisely described as “something beyond the art of painting”.
The most recognized work by the group is the aforementioned Gorgona anti-magazine, which was published between 1961 and 1966. Aside from designs by group members, Victor Vasarely, Harold Pinter and Dieter Roth also made additional contributions. The first issue by Josep Vaništa was made of nine pages that were each printed with the very same photograph of an empty window display. While the second to last issue consisted only of blank pages, the last issue (both of which were created by Vaništa) was created with only one image on the inside front cover. A total of 11 issues were published; additional concepts by Piero Manzoni or Ivo Gattin (whose idea was to have blank pages pasted together) were prepared but never realised.
The exhibition at ŻAK | BRANICKA gallery seeks to highlight not only the work of Gorgona but also its wide range of collaborative efforts. Contact was established with numerous international artists, who like Gorgona, sought expression through reduced means: Lucio Fontana, Robert Rauschenberg, Piero Manzoni, Piero Dorazio, François Morellet and Enzo Mari. In reference to Yves Klein, for example, Gorgona created a suggestion for the colour “Gorgona’s Black”, which coincided with Klein’s establishment of IKB (International Klein Blue).
The title of the exhibition, Please Attend, refers to the invitation to the exhibition entitled Modern Style curated by Gorgona at Studio G in 1962. In lieu of a press release or invitation to the exhibition, the group provided only these two words.
Based on a text written by Radonja Leposavić
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JÓZEF ROBAKOWSKI: DER LINIE NACH
03/11/2012 - 12/01/2013
Opening November 2, 2012, from 6 to 9 pm.
The energy of a lazy line...
One moment it is straight, then it swells, slants, only to stop, to move, it picks up speed, turns left, turns right, runs, runs, runs, skips the tracks, stands up, trembles, stiffens, but does not burst, takes on color, reddens, moves off again, runs, hurries a bit, turns blue, then green, flees ever faster, only to turn right, then left, then right again, it shouts something, what, halt, but it barrels on, without stopping, violet, maybe blue, no, yellow, it twists, straightens out, lifts up, falls down, hovers on the edge, takes fright, turns violet, blue, white, lifts up, falls, goes wavy, wavy, wavy, slows down, slowly stands, trembles, once more, trembles, powerfully, moves, bends, left, right, but straight, always straight, runs off, ever further, black, gray, pale, swells, breathes, melts...
Józef Robakowski (2012)
ŻAK | BRANICKA proudly presents an exhibition by the legendary avant-garde film artist of the 1960s and 1970s, Józef Robakowski (*1939). Its main subject is the line, one of the most simple and radical motifs, and one which has repeatedly cropped up in this artist’s work since the 1970s.
« 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.
To understand how radical and avant-garde Robakowski’s position was at the time, we have to consider the political situation and the film community of the day. To free himself from the control of the socialist regime, the artist shut himself in his home and made films which today we would call home videos or left the city with his camera, to the forest, for instance, where he had no fear of his equipment being confiscated. On the other hand, the artist ostentatiously cut himself off from the professional film environment (from “cinematography”), which he criticizes for surrendering to the state administration and delusions: “The moment finally came, in around 1975, when we had to bid farewell to all of socialist cinematography. Then we, workshoppers, were the only ones left, a ‘cinema of broad horizons,’ made at our own expense.” «

STANISLAW DROZDZ: FORGETTING
11/09/2012 - 27/10/2012
Opening September 11, 2012, 6 to 9 pmŻAK | BRANICKA Gallery is proud to present an exhibition by the most famous Polish concrete poetry artist: Stanisław Dróżdż. The show comprises four language versions (Polish, English, German, Finnish) of one of his most famed works: Forgetting.
The bases of Stanisław Dróżdż’s works are short texts or words. These evolve into images and are recontextualized by deconstructing their semantic meanings through a specific connection or arrangement on a flat layer or in space. In 1967, still unaware of the existence of Concrete Poetry in western art, Dróżdż started writing a kind of poetry, for which he invented the name Pojęciokształty [Concept Shapes], and whose form reflected its content. Although Dróżdż thought of himself as a poet, in his practice he materialized words through which the event of viewing became a process of actually understanding words. Even then, Dróżdż was interested in the connection between words and space. In his famous work Między [between] (Foksal Gallery, 1977) the word is written into the space of the gallery. Hence, the viewer finds himself inside the work and literally between the word.
« 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.”
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.”
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 50th 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.”
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.”
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 50th 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.
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FROM THE SUNNIEST DAY TO THE DARKEST NIGHT
22/06/2012 - 01/09/2012
Maja Bajević, Adrian Paci, Igor Grubić, Hubert Czerepok
Curated by Agata Rogoś
Opening June 22, 2012, 6 – 9 pm
«"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.
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JOANNA RAJKOWSKA: BORN IN BERLIN - A LETTER TO ROSA
27/04/2012 - 16/06/2012
Opening as part of Gallery Weekend Berlin 2012:
Friday, April 27, 2012, 6–9pm
Opening times during Gallery Weekend Berlin: April 28 – 29, 2012, 11 am to 7 pm
Joanna Rajkowska possesses an unusual ability to transform private stories into public and political events. Her works make the existence of average people or trivial events visible within a social context. "Born in Berlin", her most recent project which took over a year to create, is composed of two parts. The first is a film of the same title, produced for the 7th Berlin Biennale of Contemporary Art and in cooperation with the ŻAK | BRANICKA FOUNDATION. It will be screened at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin during the biennale. The second part, on show at ŻAK | BRANICKA Gallery is titled "Born in Berlin – A Letter to Rosa", and consists of over 100 drawings and collages, forming a very intimate letter to the artist’s daughter. Rajkowska explains to Rosa: “You were supposed to be a gift to Berlin, to this city which usually only brought destruction, at least for my family. A gift which was supposed to disenchant everything.”
«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
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HUBERT CZEREPOK: LUX AETERNA
27/01/2012 - 21/04/2012
Opening: January 27, 2012, 6–9 pm
ŻAK | BRANICKA is delighted to present the second solo-exhibition Lux Aeterna in the gallery.
The exhibition Lux Aeterna by Hubert Czerepok focuses on humanity’s dream of attaining omniscience. Czerepok is interested in the border between enlightenment and possession, between good and evil.
«Lux Aeterna is also the title of Czerepok’s latest video, shot in Norway. His protagonist takes an inward journey and holds a complicated monologue with quotes from Romantic poetry and the writings of statesmen, madmen, and tyrants (Juliusz Slowacki, Thomas Jefferson, Anders Breivik, Adolf Hitler). The background to this monologue builds with breathtaking scenery of the country’s nature: mighty northern woods, rocks, and lakes. The film’s style and expression also draw from Nazi German cinematography (e.g. Leni Riefenstahl), in which nature inspires a longing to conquer the world.
Unexpectedly for the artist, the work on the video coincided with events on the Norwegian island of Utøya, where in July 2011 the right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik, convinced that he was benefiting the world’s future, murdered 77 people. It was later revealed that during the murder Breivik was listening to a loop of Clint Mansell’s work Lux Aeterna.
The media are the main source of Czerepok’s works. The artist examines daily news and scientific articles to catch the world in its contradictions, bluffs, or perplexities. He demonstrates the frailty of the human mind: he investigates the limits of knowledge, the imagination and logic, and also enjoys exploring the spheres of the irrational. He addresses the failure of the enlightenment in The Norm of Lost 50 Micrograms sculpture, drawing from the research of scientists who declared that over the past hundred years 50 micrograms have inexplicably vanished from the model kilogram stored at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sèvres.
Lux Aeterna is an exhibition about the dream of taking control of matter and life, where the vanity of enlightenment is also madness. Madness is, according to Czerepok, like vertigo: it imperceptibly and definitively seduces, it is irreversible, which is why one of his works quotes the Joker from The Dark Knight: “Madness is like gravity. All it takes is a little push.”« [pdf - `Press release` 123.06 KB]

VLATKA HORVAT: BESIDE ITSELF
18/11/2011 - 20/01/2012
Opening: November 18, 2011, 6–9pm
ŻAK | BRANICKA is delighted to present Vlatka Horvat’s first solo-exhibition at the gallery.
Investigating the politics and poetics of spatial arrangement, order and organization, interpersonal and social relations, Vlatka Horvat’s practice explores the characteristics of interaction between the body, the built environment and the objects that inhabit it. In her collages, photographs and installations, Horvat often places the body in awkward, puzzling and uncanny positions, situating it on the horizon of objecthood—a move which questions the stability of categories and structures through which social and political meaning is made. Whilst the body in Horvat’s work is repeatedly depicted as disjointed and discombobulated, situated between functional and dysfunctional, between subject and object, the space in which it performs its often absurdist and Dadaist operations is itself “out of joint”.
«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)
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DOMINIK LEJMAN: FAR TOO CLOSE
09/09/2011 - 12/11/2011
Opening: September 9, 2011, 4 to 9 pm
We are delighted to present Dominik Lejman’s second solo exhibition, entitled Far too Close, at
ŻAK | BRANICKA Gallery.
«Based on his unique technique of merging painting with video Lejman uses his language to focus on the tension between the individual and its environment. One of his central issues here is the question of how architectural spaces influence and determine the individual’s movement within it. Through overlaying his recordings of these movements the emerging amorphous masses form geometrical patterns, hence depicting the architecture of the respective places. Very often Lejman therefor chooses highly symbolic places: In his work Fundamental Layers (2010) the pilgrims circling Mekka appear like a torrential river seen from a bird’s eye view, while the praying practitioners at Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall shape vibrant lines. In this way Lejman creates symbolic architecture or abstract, biomorphic drawings out of real characters.
The exhibition’s title, Far too Close, refers to the macro- and microscale at the same time. While observed from a distance Lejman offers us a superior structure, a molecular-like order of interpersonal relationships arise when we approach the work. For his most recent piece shown in this exhibition, 60 sec. Cathedral (2011), Lejman hired a group of skydivers, who on his instruction performed a recreation of the stellar arch of the cathedral of Durnham (UK) in the sky. Several dozens of participants needed to exercise this choreography on the floor in order repeat it afterwards several thousand meters above the ground. During the performance in the air this stellar structure lasted barely 60 seconds before the group split into its single elements again. Lejman’s works unveil a paradox fragility and elusiveness in the social, religious and political structures that he depicts: They exist within a particular timespan at a particular location, Here and Now, and can possibly dissolve at anytime. This delusive structural longevity is what Lejman is intrigued by.
Simultaneously to the exhibition at ŻAK | BRANICKA, Dominik Lejman’s video-installation Double Layer (2011) is presented at the European Parliament and in the Gardens of the Royal Library (both Brussels) as part of the Fossils and Gardens project during September 2011.«

MICHAŁ JANKOWSKI: ASTRONAUTS
01/07/2011 - 03/09/2011
Opening: July 1st 2011, 6-9 pm
Michal Jankowksi is part of the younger generation of artists, often labelled as “tired of reality,” the source of whose art is to be found not in the surrounding reality, but in the imagination, dreams, or hallucinations.
«Jankowski is following the path of surrealism in full consciousness of the decades and movements that have passed. His latest series, Astronauts (2011), is inspired by the work of two classics of experimental filmmaking from the turn of the 1950s/60s – Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica – who are regarded as pioneers and precursors of the world surrealism scene in the cinema of the absurd. This avant-garde arts duo was inspired, in turn, by the French avant-garde of the 1920s, chiefly by the surrealists and the dadaists. “The films of Borowczyk and Lenica are my point of departure, my starting point ... I try to submit to that remarkable atmosphere of horror, grotesque, and absurdity I found in them, and which is very close to my own sensibility," says Jankowski. For him, the animation of the 1950s is not only a visual goldmine of motifs and "retro" aesthetics (his pictures draw such motifs from Lenica and Borowczyk as a man in a bowler hat, and a woman with a flower-face), but above all it is an ironic commentary on the conditio humana. Under the thin layer of black humor and horror are existential themes culled from Franz Kafka or Eugène Ionesco. This is not Jankowski’s first allusion to the cinema in his work: his earlier series of works drew from Werner Herzog’s Stroszek and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. They all can be read as metaphors of human fate.
Jankowski is building a family tree for his painterly philosophy, and in reaching back to the 1950s/60s and – indirectly – to the 1920s, he is exploring what is left of past revolutions in art. "The films of Lenica and Borowczyk, such as “Astronauts,” “The House,” or “School,” broke the mold, they were original, innovative, pioneering – they discovered new worlds. The two filmmakers can be considered as heroes, explorers, and fearless conquerors,” Jankowski states. This accounts for the exhibition’s title – Astronauts – presented at ŻAK | BRANICKA gallery.
The subject of his work is often the isolation, rebellion and negation that accompanies every birth of the new. Can today’s artist be so cheerfully innovative, so painlessly adventurous? It seems unlikely, because the consciousness or knowledge of the viewer is as much a burden as the consciousness of the artist. When every glance at a painting by Jankowski casts a shadow of Philip Guston, Hieronymus Bosch or Francis Bacon, nothing remains but a conscious game of hopscotch with art history.
This sad recognition that everything has already been done thus leads to instinctive self-destruction, and to the destruction of the components of the picture. The beautiful figures and objects in Jankowski’s work, painted almost Dutch-style, disintegrate into individual atoms, or something recalling a magic, cosmic dust – just to be reborn like a Phoenix from the ashes. «

ROMAN OPAŁKA: OCTAGON
29/04/2011 - 25/06/2011
Opening: Friday, April 29, 2011 from 4 to 9 pm
Roman Opałka is one of the most radical and famous conceptual artists to date. In his life long project entitled Opałka 1965/1-∞ he paints consecutive numbers in white colour on canvases of consistently equal dimensions (195 x 135 cm), since 1965. At this time Opałka has reached the number 5 590 000. On the occasion of Opałka’s 80th birthday ŻAK | BRANICKA presents eight of his photographic self-portraits. This is the first exhibition of his work in Berlin in seventeen years.
«Opałka operates on the principles of progression and the visual and pictorial representation of time. “The foundation of my work, to which I have devoted my life, manifests itself in a process of recording a progression that both documents time, and also defines it," states the artist. 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.
Every single painting and every single photograph are part of the entire project, striving for infinity. He estimated that a person with an average life span is able to achieve the limit of seven sevens (7 777 777). This “Horizon of sevens" is a definitive frontier and is unthinkable that Opałka will be able to reach the next plane of eight eights (88 888 888). The progressive, potentially unending process of counting will therefore end only with the death of the artist. «

PAWEŁ OLSZCZYŃSKI: FANTÔME NOIR
18/03/2011 - 23/04/2011
Opening: Friday, March 18, 2011 from 6 to 9 pm
French critic Nino Frank is often given credit for coining the term “film noir”. He alleged that the novelty of film noir is its shift of the emphasis from the action to creating expressive model characters e.g.: the detective in a trench coat or the demonic femme fatale in a satin dress with a cigarette in her hand. In his drawings Pawel Olszczynski goes one step further—he abandons the characters and focuses on their props. In his work items of clothing subjectively become phantoms of the body. It is his private world—a fantôme noir.
«The world of fashion has long reached far into areas of art. Many designers like Rei Kawakubo, Maison Martin Margiela or Gareth Pugh are inspired by artworks, and their collections are often more reminiscent of collectable objects or sculptures than of actual clothing. Olszczynski asks, however, what happens if we reverse the direction of fascination. What if art falls in love with fashion? He cites the exclusivity of the handmade in fashion which in the art world has become too self-evident. His paper sculptures are wigs, purses and wallets and refer to haute couture in fashion. They are as fragile and as transitory as fashion trends.
Olszczynski seems particularly fascinated by black and the possibilities of the ordinary pencil (again, a reference to the art-world)—sometimes deep black, soft and velvety, and at others dry, precise and thin as a hair. He also radically juxtaposes the texture of materials like skin, fur and hair. He pulls his favorite motif—mostly unnaturally styled hair, that evolved into fetishes—from fashion magazines. He repeatedly returns to this motif while at the same time consciously celebrating the ritual of the obsessive, compulsive repetition, which manifests itself in an obsessive quest for perfected execution. The process of creating drawings is time consuming and laborious—physically and mentally exhausting. The hair on Olszczynski’s works is tangled, dominating the entire surface of the sheet. While repetition should satisfy, it provokes anxiety and a feeling of helplessness.
Olszczynski’s strategy is to analyze the medium of drawing. His works are a kind of visual tautology: on a piece of paper you see a piece of drawn paper, folded like a sheet of paper, Untitled (Sheet of Paper), or the drawing of hair that he shapes into the likeness of hair or a wig. The artist creates objects with his drawings. Ironically, this practice of repetition exposes the limits of mimesis. The more Olszczyński tries to convince us that a picture is reality, the more it is impossible. As a reward, however, he reveals the natural characteristics of the drawing medium. «

THE TASK OF THE TRANSLATOR
04/02/2011 - 12/03/2011
Opening: Friday, February 4, 2011 from 6 to 9 pm
Joanna Rajkowska is best known as an artist who works with public spaces. Collective memories and identities of societies form the raw material for her pieces. Her newest project The Task of the Translator was inaugurated in Konya (Turkey) last year. The starting point for Rajkowska’s project is her reflection on the mechanisms and consequences of the language reform that took place in newly founded Turkey in 1928, led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
«Within this reform the Perso-Arabic alphabet was replaced by the extended Latin, the so called Turkish alphabet. Arabic or Persian loanwords were exchanged for Turkish equivalents that were partly absolutely built from scratch. Taking up on this, Rajkowska bases her work on one of the probably most important humanistic texts The Task of the Translator, written by Walter Benjamin and published in 1923 as an introduction to his translation of Charles Baudelaire’s volume of poetry Tableaux parisiens.
Benjamin understands the task of the translator as a striving for the “pure language”: »...Real translation is transparent, it does not hide the original, it does not steal its light, but allows the pure language, as if reinforced through its own medium, to fall on the original work with greater fullness....«
Regarding the fact that in contemporary Turkey, the Ottoman language is only known by a handful of specialists and is, when used, interpreted as a political response or religious declaration (the Persio-Arabic alphabet is reserved only for the Koran), Rajkowska asks: What happens to the meaning of written texts, when its visual form is changed? What happened to Turkish culture and identity after 1928? And finally: what happens to a society with a „replaced” identity and what kind of processes lead to the denial of one’s own culture and the enforcement of a new, alien one instead?
Rajkowska presents the process of translation through a symbolic gesture – an artists book. She translated the complete text of Benjamin’s essay into German and Ottoman Turkish, as well as two different renderings in Turkish that were written in Latin script. Copies of this limited edition were donated to the library in Konya and to other libraries both in Turkey and abroad. We should remember that for the majority of people from this country, archivals, literature and poetry of the Ottoman Empire from before 1928 became unreadable and can only be understood by very few people.
The exhibition in Berlin sheds new light on Rajkowska’s work in several ways. First of all, through Berlin as a city and second of all through the biografie of Walter Benjamin, which is closely linked to the city. Benjamin was a German-Jewish intellectual, born and raised in Berlin, who was forced to leave Germany in 1933 and commited suicide in 1940 while trying to escape the Nazis. A further aspect is that ŻAK | BRANICKA gallery is located in Berlin – Kreuzberg where the majority of the population comes from Anatoly, known as the most conservative part of Turkey. And last but not least, the exhibition takes place at a time in Germany when a book by Thilo Sarrazin Deutschland schafft sich ab can sell more than a million copies and while the chancellor Angela Merkel declares the death of German multiculturalism.
The exhibition in ŻAK | BRANICKA gallery is the next part of the Benjamin in Konya project, which was realised by Joanna Rajkowska in 2009/2010 as part of the My City project. It was devised and managed by the British Council in partnership with Anadolu Kültür and Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Centre. The My City project forms part of the European Union’s Cultural Bridges programme.
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YANE CALOVSKI
12/11/2010 - 29/01/2011
Obsessive Setting
Opening: Friday, November 12th, 2010, 6-9 pm
After the dream, they set out in search of that city; they never found it, but they found one another; they decided to build a city like the one in the dream.
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
On July 26th, 1963, Skopje (Macedonia) was hit and destroyed by a devastating earthquake. In 1965, a team of Japanese architects, ‘Kenzo Tange Associates’, was invited to compete for and eventually won the opportunity to construct a new Master Plan for the city. However, this original plan was never fully implemented.
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Yane Calovski’s investigation of the process of articulating and executing Kenzo Tange’s Master Plan delves deep into the conflict between individual utopian dreams and those of a collective body, at the time especially significant in Eastern Europe as well as in the rapidly changing Japan. Calovski collects evidence of displacements and transformations through diverse narratives, scrutinizing the details of production, of failures and unrealized ambitions, and finally the causes for these lapses - here adding his artistic interpretation.
The project, entitled Obsessive Setting, has been developed specifically for ŻAK | BRANICKA Gallery and continues Calovski’s ongoing Master Plan project that was presented at Manifesta 7 (2008) and in Book 3 – Lapses for the Turkish Pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale: “…The project is also about the memory construction of a nation. Kenzo’s Master Plan of the city of Skopje clearly indicates a common dream, which indeed failed and could only be applied to a certain degree. […] Planning the city suggests designing the lives of its inhabitants. In that respect, Master Plan was the subject of this beautiful future dream. Somehow, it faded out…” (Başak Şenova curator of the Turkish Pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale).
Obsessive Setting, will manifest itself as a repository modular structure that serves as an ideal storage unit for possible processes and meaningful archives. Structurally, the unit refers directly to Kenzo Tange’s original architectural model which is currently stored in the Museum of the City of Skopje. Calovski’s object is made up of drawers, screens and mirrors. In addition, it provides its potential user with room for work and respite. The drawers’ contents (drawings, photographs, texts) and the screened videos, will change in the course of the exhibition, turning the object into a manifestation of Calovski’s obsessive, particle-by-particle reconstruction of Tange’s extensive work. Calovski will also be consolidating a part of the original planning team (Samon Takahashi, FOS, and Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss) and associates with whom during the course of the exhibition he will build the archive, as well as develop a context for responding to the original Master Plan by Kenzo Tange.
Yane Calovski’s work is conceptual and context-based. He has lived and worked in the United States, Japan, the Netherlands and Macedonia. Recent solo exhibitions include Ponder Pause Process (a Situation) at the Tate Britain (2010) and Hollow Land/ Master Plan at European Kunsthalle in Cologne (2009), as well as Manifesta 7 (2008). His works form part of the Deutsche Bank collection in London. He currently lives and works in Skopje.
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KRZYSZTOF ZIELIŃSKI
10/09/2010 - 06/11/2010
BRIESEN
Opening: Friday, September 10th, 2010, 6-9 pm
Briesen is the old German name for a provincial town situated in the north of Poland that was once a part of former eastern Prussia. The town's Polish name, Wąbrzeźno, is one difficult for the foreigner to pronounce. It is a grey and unremarkable place. It is where Krzysztof Zieliński was born and raised. Briesen is also the name of the artist's new photographic series.
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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.
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MINIMUM MAXIMUM
11/06/2010 - 04/09/2010
STANISŁAW DRÓŻDŻ | CARL ANDRE | ROBERT BARRY
The exhibition at Gallery ŻAK | BRANICKA displays for the first time the work of Polish Concrete Poetry artist Stanisław Dróżdż, alongside the classic minimal and conceptual work of Carl Andre and Robert Barry.
«This exhibition brings together Dróżdż’s most important original works from the 1960s – including Forgetting, Uncertainty-Hesitation-Certainty (1967), Duration (1968), Life-Death (1969), Loneliness (1967), Algebra of Prepositions (1987), Permutations (1989) – and one of his key numeric works Untitled (Numerical Texts). The slide projection from 1971 by Robert Barry, as well as the textual works of Carl Andre from the 60s and 70s, posits Dróżdż’s work in the greater context of art from that period. What the works of these artists connects is the analysis of words and their relation to space. These works are at the same time text and image existing at once on a flat layer and in space.
The exhibition title MINIMUM MAXIMUM is a quotation from Dróżdż’s work entitled Optimum from 1967. Both words are written in capitals creating a graphic arrangement in which the two opposing meanings MINIMUM and MAXIMUM almost imperceptibly merge into one another. MINIMUM MAXIMUM is also a classic “coincidentia oppositorum“ – a unification of opposites. The opposition of meanings is explored in the works shown in this exhibition on a number of layers – such as image and word, content and form, materiality and virtuality, surface and space, black and white, in the binary system as well as in the philosophical division of good and evil.
The basis of Stanisław Dróżdż’s works are always short texts or words. These evolve into images and are put into a new context by destroying their semantic meanings through a specific connection or arrangement on a flat layer or in space. In 1967 still unaware of the existence of Concrete Poetry, Dróżdż started writing a type of poetry, for which he came up with the name Concept Shapes and whose form reflected its content. Dróżdż thought of himself as a poet, although he wanted to materialise words through which the practice of viewing became a process of actually understanding words. Even then Dróżdż was interested in the connection between words and space. In his most famous work Untitled (in-between) (Foksal Gallery, 1977) the word is written into the space of the gallery.
Carl Andre and Robert Barry studied the spatial relations of words early on in their careers as well. Since the 1970s Robert Barry has created slide projections with individual words, photography and text fragments, in which he works with language as a medium. From his earliest work up to those word-spaces that are well known today, he searches for spatial experiences and dimensions. Zdenek Felix accentuated in the foreword of the exhibition Robert Barry at the Folkwang Museum (1978) what this kind of art demands of the viewer. It “… reduces the visual information to a minimum and challenges the imagination and the emotional, intellectual and last but not least, aesthetic range of the viewer to its maximum. Barry’s works – slide projections, prints, books, drawings etc – circle more than one rational or theoretical complexes without ever defining them …“ Carl Andre on the other hand, in poetry written from the 1960s either by hand or typewriter, treated words (notation, shape and sound) in a similar way to sculpture.
The exhibition comprehends the numerical and wording works of Stanisław Dróżdż, in which the artist tests the principles according to which both of these systems function (language or mathematics) and tries to list all possible combinations. Language is for him a system of sets where he runs through all possible operations. This is very well shown in his work Algebra of Prepositions which is a geometric illustration of possible combinations of prepositions. The similar work Permutations is a record of all the letter combinations in the word PERMUTATION. His search for “combinatoric rules“ led Dróżdż to the work “Alea Iacta Est“, which was exhibited in the Polish pavilion on the Venice Biennale in 2003, and in which the walls of the pavilion were covered with all 46,656 possible combinations of 6 playing dice.
Stanisław Dróżdż (1939-2009) was the most famous creator of Polish Concrete Poetry. In 1968 he debuted in the no longer extant gallery “Pod Mona Lisą“ in Wrocław, and from 1971 on 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“. He was in constant contact with protagonists of Concrete Poetry from around the world such as Ian Hamilton Finlay, Eugen Gomringer and Vaclav Havel. In 2003 he represented Poland at the 50th Venice Biennale.«

PAWEL KSIAZEK
30/04/2010 - 05/06/2010
Poelzig VS. Poelzig
Opening: April 30, 2010, 4-8pm
GALLERY WEEKEND BERLIN
As part of Gallery Weekend, gallery ŻAK | BRANICKA takes great pleasure in presenting Paweł Książek’s Poelzig VS. Poelzig. This is the second exhibition of the artist’s work, following Silent Utopia at Art Basel Statements 2009, and is based on ideas connecting cinema produced during the inter war years and modernist architecture.
« 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.
«

AGNIESZKA POLSKA
20/03/2010 - 24/04/2010
Three Videos with Narration
Opening: March 19, 2010, 6-9pm
ŻAK | BRANICKA Gallery takes great pleasure in presenting the most recent work of Agnieszka Polska: "Three Videos with Narration". Polska is one of the most interesting Polish artists of the younger generation (born 1985), whose work has been shown at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, the Kunstbygning in Aarhus and the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw.
«The source materials of Polska’s videos are photographs taken from prewar newspapers and art magazines from the 1960s, which she animates. Polska is interested in the aesthetic of old photographs; their poor quality or raster, which in turn lends itself to giving the animation an old fashioned documentary quality.
"Three Videos with Narration" is an ironic triptych exploring a history of misunderstandings, omissions and black holes in art history. The artist states: “Misunderstandings, misinterpretations - these are the factors which push culture forward, creating new qualities and posing new questions. The archive - as each and every living organism - lives and changes without ceasing, endlessly multiplying images of itself. Elements which have been negated and rejected in the process of archiving later emerge as the dark matter of our subconscious.”
Polska treats art as an archive and takes on the role of an archival critic or librarian. She is interested not in that which is left to be archived, but that which has been forgotten. “I was thinking about the gap that appears between the knowledge of the art critic and the knowledge of art history. The moment that the art critic stops taking an interest in the work of art, it's often forgotten for the same period of time, before art history is ready to value it once again.”
The protagonists of the two films "The forgetting of proper names" (3:45) and "My favorite things" (5:35) are the works of the artists Robert Morris (Three L-Beams, 1965), Robert Smithson (Nine mirror displacements, 1969), Walter de Maria (The New York Earth Room, 1977) and Wolf Vostell (In Ulm, um Ulm und um Ulm herum, 1964) amongst others. In Polska’s two videos, she deprives the works of their primary context and they consequently lose the function they were meant to have, and are finally grouped as an absurd collection devoid of meaning. Turned into a joke, they become caricatures that have nothing in common with the original intention of the artist. They become a type of prop with which one can kit out a dolls house.
The video "Sensitization to colour" (5:02) refers to the performance of the same title made in 1968 by a Polish avant-garde artist, Włodzimierz Borowski. Borowski, one of the key artists of the Polish conceptual art movement, has, granted, taken his place in history, but is to this day not rightfully appreciated. The performance can be described as painterly and colourful and was documented in black and white photographs, which Polska used as a basis to rebuild the space in which it was originally enacted. She uses materials only in greyscale. The film, which can be taken as a commentary on the process of understanding art from the past, shows a new space for the performance, one that has been abandoned by the artist and all viewers. "Sensitization to colour" is thus a hypothetical reconstruction of a work of art on the basis of presently available photography and studies. Polska as an archeologist reconstructs the work. What accuracy does this reconstruction have? Is the myth of the artist a truthful representation?
The exhibition "Three Videos with Narration" questions the ways and intentions of writing the history of art. Are we, after all these years, able to reconstruct the past and correctly interpret art, based only on fragmentory information? And in the end, the artists’ first intentions, or even those ellusive elements like humour or irony are often distorted, and art loses its primary context. Polska applies Freud’s theory “These are cases in which a name is in fact not only forgotten, but wrongly remembered” to the visual arts.«

KWIEKULIK
05/02/2010 - 13/03/2010
Activities with Dobromierz
The ŻAK | BRANICKA Gallery is proud to present Activities with Dobromierz (1972-74), a work by the artistic duet KwieKulik, one of the most important phenomena of the eastern European neo-avant-garde 1970s movement. Activities with Dobromierz has already had much international publicity including showings at Documenta XII in Kassel and the XI Biennale in Istanbul (2009).
«After the birth of their son, Dobromierz, KwieKulik incorporated the child in their art activities for two years (1972- 74). “By combining parent’s responsibilities with artwork, we achieve the most variable compositions of our son with subjects of everyday utilities, containers, and surfaces – in situations that inquire our home or outdoor walks – all such compositions are captured on photo slides.”
KwieKulik developed an alternative form of artist’s work within the reality of Socialism. The Actions with Dobromierz, where the parents manipulate as if using a doll, have a strong political overtone (oppression of the authorities). They are the artists’ response to omnipresent manipulation and censorship as well as introducing the absurd to reality (even though the reality of Socialism was absurd enough). Simultaneously, the aim of Activities with Dobromierz was to create a visual equivalent of mathematical and logical operations, which Kwiek and Kulik were interested in at the time.
Art for KwieKulik was the extension of everyday activity. Similar to other art duets of this era such as Abramovic/Ulay (1976-89) or Gilbert&George (from 1968), KwieKulik worked on the boundaries of private life, performance and body art.
«

SZYMON KOBYLARZ
20/11/2009 - 30/01/2010
Civil Defense
Opening: November 20th, 2009, 6-9pm
Paranoid protuberances of science are Szymon Kobylarz’s source of inspiration. He is interested in quasi-scientific absurdities and the border on which rationality and obsession fester.
In his newest work, realized for Gallery ŻAK | BRANICKA, Kobylarz utilizes experiences from his school days. At that time and in light of the Cold War, all the Warsaw Agreement member states established “Civil Defense” courses. The subject matter of these lessons regarded defense mechanisms pertaining to various threats and the requisite behavior in the case of catastrophe. The children learned First Aid measures. They also obtained basic knowledge of the building and handling of weapons.
For Kobylarz, the “Civil Defense” course had a completely different meaning: it was a frame in which the boys were finally allowed to play war. At that time as well as now, he is so engaged by the provisional and abstruse conception of homemade emergency equipment that he dedicated the entire exhibition to it.
With “Civil Defense” Kobylarz asks the questions, what happens to science if it takes a wrong turn? How far can science let itself be compromised and perverted? While working on this project, the artist transformed himself into a kook inventor and in that process he turned towards an antiquated artistic model: he has repositioned art between science and Utopia.

DOMINIK LEJMAN
22/09/2009 - 14/11/2009
Afterparty
Opening on Friday, September 25, 2009, 6-11 pm
The Afterparty is set at a strange apex of suspension. Does it have an end point? Or could it be a permanent state? The moment when music still drips out of the ears and alcohol wades around in the brain, and when broken glass groans underfoot – it is the moment when everyone is gone and an uncomfortable silence takes control. Make-up streams down the empty faces, and behind the boarded up windows, a new day wakes up a city and you feel like a clown. You see and understand too much to admit the truth. The Afterparty is the end of levity. Exactly at this moment, these few seconds when time has delayed itself, is the topic of Domink Lejman’s work.
Lejman’s technique is innovative: he projects video onto the dark surface of monochromatic, abstractly painted canvases – in this way the surface of the canvas and the projection are optically merged. Despite Lejman’s depriving both media of their autonomy, he considers this work as a pure painting process with projector’s light seen as another layer of both the brush and its stroke. In that way, the traditional painting takes on a new factor: time. Domink Lejman’s paintings are time-based paintings.

FROM THE ARCHIVE
26/06/2009 - 19/09/2009
Group Show
Opening on Friday, June 26, 2009, 6-9 pm
Wojciech Bąkowski, Yane Calovski, Sławomir Elsner, Katarzyna Kozyra, Paweł Ksiązek, Zofia Kulik, Robert Kuśmirowski, Agnieszka Polska
«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.
«

PAWEŁ KSIAZEK "SILENT UTOPIA" ART | BASEL STATEMENTS
10/06/2009 - 14/06/2009
Solo show for the ART | BASEL, Art Basel Statements
ŻAK | BRANICKA, 10 – 14. 06.2009 Basel, CH
Halle 01 Stand S3
Opening June, 8th, 2009, 4-7 pm
www.artbasel.com
Paweł Książek’s project, Silent Utopia, combines two potentially distant aesthetic subjects: Eastern European Modernism in Architecture and German silent films of the 1920s. Silent Utopia consists of paintings, photo collages, and video based on found footage from the silent films.
«Paweł Książek’s project Silent Utopia is a speculative fantasy regarding the infiltrations and connections between Eastern European modernism in architecture and German silent film of the 1920’s. The Art Basel Statements presentation focuses on Metropolis, the 1925 film by director and architect, Fritz Lang, and the implementations of such prominent architects of the period.
Fritz Lang’s film conceives of an architectural future directly inspired by the Manhattan skyline. “I saw a street that by means of neon lights was lit as brightly as if it were day. (...) This impression gave me my first idea of a city of the future. The skyscrapers functioned as an opulent theatre-set hung to dazzle, dispel, and hypnotize from a dismal sky.” Fritz Lang’s vision that materialized in Metropolis was unfortunately never accepted by the public. Architecture, though, surfaced as an astonishingly resilient tool for constructing a vision of the future, both in science fiction film and in reality. The architects of the 20’s and 30’s were as well dreaming of an idealized person, society and city. Although both visions – the fantastical future projections of the film of the period and the grandiose idealism visible in the architecture– awakened ambitious promises, they were quickly met with public repulsion and dismissed, becoming a silent utopia of broken dreams.
Paweł Książek examines the connections between this architecture and the film and based on these connections, he proposes a hypothetical analogy for the existence of a sensibility common to that era of creators and thinkers. Upon examining both aesthetics, he wonders whether there were visual markers that could have been prognostic of the impending catastrophe. Książek speculates about how a film could look, and how its content would be altered or maintained, when Czech, Hungarian or Polish architecture replaces the scenography. What would it look like if the film was made in Prague with the Bata Shop building in the background (Ludvik Kysela, Bata Store, Prague 1929), or in Brno in front of Josef Kranz’s 1929 Café Era, using the building’s neon E-R-A sign to light the street on a Metropolis night? In fact, why wasn’t the film shot on Warsaw’s “Ulica Przyszlosci” (“Future Street”) designed by Lech Niemojewski in 1925?
Paweł Książek’s paintings and photomontages function as his tools in effacing the border between document and fiction. By juxtaposing and overlaying these two historical phenomena, connected by a trust in the future and contemporaneously created in different places in Europe, Pawel Książek has built a new version of the world and his own fake vision of the past. Silent Utopia is simultaneously a historiographical examination of an era and an idealism and a reckoning of the development of the aesthetic relationship between Eastern and Western Europe in modernity. The work that he has created based on archival materials is principally surreal. Asserting that both the past and the future are inaccessible to us, Paweł Książek offers us the potentially most efficient way to get know them, in fantasy.«

ZBIGNIEW ROGALSKI
01/05/2009 - 20/06/2009
ECHO
Opening: 1 May 2009, 4-9 pm
Upended little bags of Cocaine in which the drugs are replaced by a streak of white; an empty Aquarium, in the panes of which its own reflection is visible; paintings that copy faded, scaled down versions of themselves – these are the phantoms of Zbigniew Rogalski’s Paintings.
«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.
«

KASIA FUDAKOWSKI
20/03/2009 - 25/04/2009
Gleaning the Gloss
Opening: 20.3.2009 6-9 pm
ŻAK | BRANICKA is pleased to present Kasia Fudakowski’s first solo show in Berlin, Gleaning the Gloss. The exhibition features 12 new sculptures. They are characters, objects and obstructions which transform the gallery into a great forest of delicious and sinuous forms that while invoking surrealist associations, at the same time recall abstractly figurative forms in the midst of identifiable gesture.
« “…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
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FUTURE PERFECT GALLERY
20/03/2009 - 25/04/2009
CHIMAERA: Bjorn Hegardt, Lisa Iglesias, Stephan Weitzel
Opening: 20.3.2009 6-9 pm
The exhibition presents work by three artists focusing on drawing as their medium.
« 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.
«
WITKACY - ROBAKOWSKI
06/02/2009 - 17/03/2009
CONFIDENCE MEN
Opening: February 6th 2009, 6-9 p.m.
With the exhibition WITKACY–ROBAKOWSKI at the ŻAK | BRANICKA gallery, two of the most important personalities in Polish art meet face-to-face for the first time. Both confidence(con) men, tricksters, swindlers and eternal practical jokers, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz – called “Witkacy” (1885-1939) – legendary artist, painter, writer and dramaturge, philosopher, photograph, and enfant terrible of the inter-war polish and international art scenes, is confronted by Józef Robakowski (born 1939), an artist of the polish neo-avant-garde of the 60’s and 70’s, co-creator of Film Form Workshops, and the author of such well known videos as “View from my Window” and “My Video Masochism.”
«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.
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ŁUKASZ JASTRUBCZAK
06/02/2009 - 17/03/2009
Video Point | White video
Opening: February 6th 2009, 6-9 p.m.
Jastrubczak is a young multimedia artist who examines the fields of invisibility, disappearance, ephemeral revelation and lunacy. At the same time as his work is absurd and amusing, it is also deliberate and somber. In White Film, we see Jastrubczak sitting in a white bathrobe with a white square suspended to cover his face (with eyeholes, also square). He is tapping out a beat. Jastrubczak presses an unidentified buzzer into the bottom of an empty white bowl on the table in front of him and taps the table, a white mug, and a pair of scissors with the back of a spoon. In the short video, Jastrubzcak renders himself neutral by shielding his identity and nullifies himself in white. He becomes another white object, like the mug or the table, performing an action and only fulfilling his duty: a white robot.
«Jastrubczak’s interest in the reforming and disappearance of character, especially his own, is a recurrent them in his video work: he makes costumes and masks, recreates classic films in his own sets removing the characters, and even sometimes works (supposedly in collaboration with himself) under a pseudonym. Jastrubczak takes on these activities essentially as temporal and contextual experiments where disappearance, the significance of presence and its incontrovertible transience are both the catalysts and the findings.«

VIDEO POINT
12/12/2008 - 31/01/2009
Agnieszka Polska | Medical Gymnastics
Opening: 12. 12. 2008 6-9 pm
In the hands of the young artist, Agnieszka Polska, the human body becomes a projection involved in rituals of subjugation that overturn social norms and expectations.
"Medical Gymnastics" is based on photographs from a 1920’s book of physical therapy exercises for children that Polska digitally manipulated, implanting eroticized movement with an almost unsettling quality.
ANNA BAUMGART
12/12/2008 - 31/01/2009
The Hypothesis of the Stolen Image
Opening: 12. 12. 2008 6-9 pm
Exhibition: 13. 12. 2008 - 31. 01. 2009
Since its inception, photography has enabled the media to spread unlimited amounts of images endlessly, but within this growing mass of pictures, certain images have tended to single themselves out. Engraved in public memory, they seem familiar and they seem to represent the entirety of what they portray: the horror of war, the psyche of a leader, or the despair of refugees.
Anna Baumgart uses some of these famous press photographs as the points of origin for her work.
«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
31/10/2008 - 10/12/2008
SUMMERTALE
Opening: Friday, 31.10.2008, 6 - 9 pm
Exhibition: 01.11.2008 - 10.12.2008
Once upon a time in a land not too far away there was a beautiful little house in a wonderful flower garden, the birds were chirping, the bees and flies were buzzing. Midget women were hanging laundry out to dry, beating carpets, hoeing the vegetable garden, watering plants. It became dark and there in the moonlight suddenly three mushrooms started to grow…
«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…
The project In Art Dreams Come True started when Katarzyna Kozyra decided to spend her DAAD stipends learning operatic performance and make-up art, taking a definitive step in the direction of a new performance art. With the help of Gloria Viagra, a famous Berlin Drag Queen who Kozyra sees as the model of pure femininity, and the Maestro, a professional operatic vocal coach named Grzegorz Pitulej, Kozyra began a process and a work of art that demanded her to take on new feats both artistically and professionally. She entered into worlds saturated with artifice, conventions and posing. Kozyra’s interest here lay in the challenging of traditional boundaries between performer/artist and audience. She suggests that the responses elicited from the audience are as much a part of the piece as the artist and everything remaining under his/her control. Indeed, as Kozyra receives continuous instruction from Gloria and the Maestro during the performance itself, she is simultaneously bending and manipulating the role of the student. The development of flexible and shifting power dynamics both between teacher and student and performer/artist and audience is documented.
The project questions what it means to be a living star and those fundaments of femininity which allow a woman to exhibit herself, sing, dance, satisfy and succeed. Kozyra’s role as both Gloria’s and the Maestro’s doppelganger (double) and her transformations within the different filmic works—from knave, to operatic beauty, to punk-rock diva or Snow White—serves as the back drop for a work that brings into focus the influences a piece of art has upon its setting, its participants, and its audience.
Kozyra summarizes the entire her project with this confident statement: “Anyone can dance, sing, and act. And from my omnipotence comes a certainty that I will succeed at whatever I choose to focus on, because I’m potentially talented in every area”.
«

JAROSłAW FLICIŃSKI
05/09/2008 - 25/10/2008
NO MATTER WHERE IT HAPPENS
Opening: Friday, 05.09.2008, 6 - 9 pm
Exhibition: 06.09.2008 - 24.10.2008
Perhaps as a result of Jarosław Fliciński’s training in architecture and painting, the idea of imposing painting onto a space comes naturally to him. He began working with oil on canvas, but soon shifted from the canvas straight onto the walls.
My paintings slid suddenly from the canvas. It happened in the moment when the canvas’s frames became too narrow.
« In order to view Fliciński’s works, one must initially consider space and motion. The paintings extend into a period of time. The artist chooses the precise composition for each space according to his assessment of the space’s conditions, for example what kind of light it receives. The mural becomes a landscape surrounding the spectator; it is spellbinding and even overwhelming. The spectator is placed in the eye of the storm. It is the scale, repetition of a simple geometric motif, and colour that create this sensation. The colour is especially important in Fliciński’s works - We feel it physically, as though it is a movement of air or a change in temperature.
Fliciński says: The basis of my work is pure painting- my works are about seeing. The spectator takes pleasure in observing. After stepping out of the spectacle, the viewer’s ability to see and absorb is heightened.
His geometrical murals, consisting of stripes or ellipses, build a bridge between the flat surface and three–dimensional space. The ellipse is the Judas of geometry and it is allies are seeing and perspective. Standing in front of the mural, one cannot trust his or her own eyes as the form begins to vibrate and move, drawing the viewer deeper into it. The ellipse’s ignoring of the traditional vertical and the horizontal edges of a painting is what makes the form so attractive and enticing to the viewer.
We are lead to assume that this ellipse continues above and below, extending into infinity, and doesn’t concern itself with the edges of the ceiling or floor. These ruptures of traditional boundaries are what make Fliciński’s work as suitable for gothic cathedrals as it is for private homes.
When I paint my walls in temporary spaces, I have already agreed to their future in-existence. Out of this, the themes of the ephemeral and the fragile appear, which seem to be inherently human. The more the paintings are specified to a space, the more we feel their disappearance. Actually, my murals are works about passing and despairing. In order not to inflict them with too many meanings, I like to topple them over with the title.
“The Rest is up to you”, “Up, up, and away”, “As you Wish”, “Never Been Better”, “End of the Summer”, and “A Kiss is not Enough” are titles for his work that are connected with emotions, which are in turn connected with the places or moments in which he made a decision about the work. We absorb Fliciński’s paintings with our senses, which is why they last in our memory for so long. In the end, all of Fliciński’s work “No Matter Where it Happens”, manages both to trick the spectator’s eye and to seduce his soul. «

ART BERLIN CONTEMPORARY
05/09/2008 - 07/09/2008
ŻAK | BRANICKA with Katarzyna Kozyra
MICHAŁ JANKOWSKI
14/06/2008 - 30/08/2008
FAT TROUT
The exhibition´s title FAT TROUT refers to the name of a trailer park in the film Twin Peaks- Fire walk with me by David Lynch, a location, where detectives searched for clues concerning the murder of Teresa Banks. In the film a fat trout was depicted on the welcome board of this mysterious and frightening location. This motive, in combination with the dark atmosphere of David Lynch’s film, provided the motivation for Jankowski’s further explorations.
«
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.
«

HUBERT CZEREPOK
14/06/2008 - 30/08/2008
Haunebu
The project Haunebu reconstructs one of the most thrilling conspiracy theories of World War II: German engineers were to invent spaceships with the aim of winning the war for Hitler’s Germany. This safely guarded secret, the so called Wunderwaffe, was a flying saucer named Haunebu. Based on available documents, Hubert Czerepok strives, in as realistic way as possible, to represent the myth of an advanced German technology.
«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.
«

FUTURE PERFECT GALLERY
14/06/2008 - 30/08/2008
Piotr Jaros, The House
Jaros' Filme, Zeichnungen, Fotografien und Prototypen der letzten Jahre, sowohl solche, die sich auf die rätselhafte Sphäre von Haus und Herd beziehen, als auch seine ironisch futuristischen Fantasien über die Arbeit, nehmen eine Form von offen strukturierten, existentiellen Anekdoten an.
«
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.
«

ZOFIA KULIK: SPLENDOUR OF MYSELF V
05/04/2008 - 11/06/2008
Opening: Saturday, April 05th, 6-9 pm
Lindenstr. 35, 10969 Berlin
At long last, after her participation at the Documenta XII the polish artist Zofia Kulik received international attention. As many documentation photos have proven, her large-scale photomontages fascinated the public. Her monumental black and white constructions, consisting of a multitude of smaller motifs, connect like a puzzle to reveal the whole image.
«
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.
«

OSKAR HANSEN'S MOMA
05/04/2008 - 11/06/2008
by Yane Calovski and Hristina Ivanoska
Opening: Saturday, 05 April 2008, 6-9 pm
Lindenstr. 35, 10969 Berlin The project a hypothetical program of a "lost museum" designed by a Polish architect
Oskar Hansen in 1964. Meant to become a symbol of the city's progress and
"immortality" following the devastating earthquake on 26th of July 1963, the competition
for the best design of a new art institution was organized by the Polish government as a gesture of solidarity and was open exclusively to architects from Poland and other
Eastern Block countries.
«Oskar Hansen's proposal was based on peculiar assumptions: the museum was to consist of "a transformable exhibition space, able to fold completely and then unfold into various combinations, with hexagonal elements lifted by hydraulically-powered rotating telescopes." In this way the structure would transform in horizontal and vertical
dimensions at the same time. In the proposal the architect wrote: "Art in its development is unpredictable. We have assumed that a contemporary gallery should pursue the unknown in art. It shouldn't only aim at exhibiting artworks, but also encouraging and provoking their birth." Hansen's design was not implemented. The jury finally selected a design submitted by a team of three Polish architects: W. Klyzewski, J. Mokrzynski and E. Wierzbicki.
The project by Calovski and Ivanoska is a study of multiple hypotheses surrounding
reading of art historical references. It manifests a view on historical analysis involving the documentation of Hansen's proposal and of the possible exhibition and lecture
programme that would have engaged artists such as Paul Thek, Mladen Stilinovic, Andrzej Szewczyk, Ana Mendieta, Ad Reinhardt, and others. The project is also a reflection on musealization of art and construction of parallel historical narrations. What would have happened had Hansen's utopian proposal been accepted? What kind of curatorial strategies would have been enforced by the reality of a "foldaway museum"? Can we foresee any artistic reactions to the idealistic umbrella-like platforms that were, after all, supposed not only to host but also to inspire art? These are some of the questions the new work of Ivanoska and Calovski is posing while they fantasize about alternative art history which they construct on the basis of contemporary knowledge of Central and Eastern European avant-garde art.«

SHOWROOM: MAGDALENA ABAKANOWICZ
30/04/2015 - 19/06/2015
Magdalena Abakanowicz, Anatomy 1, 2009, jute, resin, wood and steel, 150 x 48 x 28 cm