"blankly, perfect summer": online catalogue

blankly, perfect summer
curated by Malgorzata & Marcin Golebiewski




WOJTEK DOROSZUK
KAROLINA KOWALSKA
BARTOSZ KOKOSINSKI
WOJTEK KUBIAK & LIDIA KRAWCZYK
NORMAN LETO
JACEK MALINOWSKI
AGNIESZKA POLSKA
JANEK SIMON
GRZEGORZ SZTWIERTNIA
JULIAN TOMASZUK
ALICJA ZEBROWSKA

May 09, 2008 - June 08th 2008,
vertexList in association with Galeria NOVA










WOJTEK DOROSZUK
The Dissection Theatre




video, 10’20”, DVD pal 16:9;, color, sound;, Kraków 2006

“Searching for the genuine and revealing the inauthentic is a characteristic motif in Wojtek Doroszuk’s work (...). “The Dissection Theatre”, a film showing preparations of a corpse for the funeral, touches the genuine and transgresses the artificial. The extreme experience of breaking a taboo through the lens of a seemingly “objective” camera, shown in an aesthetically perfect form, makes the artist and viewer immune to shock. The effect is reinforced by references to the rational Renaissance art of Andrea Mantegna, Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo.”

http://www.artfacts.net/



BARTOSZ KOKOSINSKI
Hagia Sophia



VD, 11:03min., 2007, with music by Aldéa & Chiossone

,,Hagia Sophia” starts out with a sound of church bells: one moment later a wax sculpture of the famous temple Hagia Sophia is placed on a hot plate. The wax miniature of the temple melts gradually and the hot wax drips down to a plaster cast, where the building slowly reconstitutes itself back to its original from. ”Hagia Sophia” is a contemplative film, showing symbolic process of destruction and repeated becoming this Christian/ Muslim temple, now functioning as a museum in secular Turkey.

http://www.nova.art.pl/


KAROLINA KOWALSKA
JPG / TXT



2007, [slideshow and projection]

The project is a collection of jpgs and texts found on the internet. Both texts and images are taken from blogs and web sites about art, music, art and media theory. At the moment there are apx. 300 jps and 12 texts in the archive. They were all found in 2007, so the collection keeps expanding. Files are available on the internet just for some time, then they are no longer seen by the Google search engine. The two video projections consist of material collected from the internet, which are saved in an archive as a continuous project. The material examines the special conditions of perception and representation of art works and art related concepts on the web. Images of art works are mixed-up with non-related imagery, which seems to gain certain kind of pictorial quality online that competes with the art images.

http://www.karolinakowalska.pl/


LIDIA KRAWCZYK, WOJTEK KUBIAK
Kaleidoscope



from cycle Genderqueer, music Adam Roman, DVD 9:35 min., loop, 2008.

Movie Kaleidoscope (min. 9:35, 2008) is part of a bigger cycle Genderqueer. We have used in this film materials that we made during photographic session for a group of paintings. The main aim here is to introduce the viewer to a particular trance related to identity issues. We show fragments of faces, hair and clothing accessories resulting in an complex, multifaceted ornament. The name gendergueer refers to human identity, both cultural and sexual, as well as the general discourse of queer theory. We approach the "queer" as a space for conversation, where we can deconstruct the typical, heterosexual norms and disclose their essence as social fabrications.

http://krawczykkubiak.blogspot.com/


JACEK MALINOWSKI
HalfAWoman



digital video,12 min. 50 sec, USA, 2000._directing, script, camera, editing, set design: Jacek Malinowski_actors: Joan Fitzsimmons, Jacek Malinowski (voice)-producer: Jacek Malinowski

"HalfAWoman" is the three part film I work on since the year 2000 when I finished it's first episode. Then "Half A Woman 2" emerged in 2005 and "Half A Woman ...three years later" is going to be released in April 2008. I can say that this project is so far the most complex of my work. Although it looks documentary, it is more likely to confuse viewers rather that explain anything. There isn't a single frame audience could believe with no reservations. The project entirely relies on fiction.

"HalfAWoman" tells the story of a handicapped woman, who lost the lower half of her body to a mysterious disease called PDS Syndrome. The film shows her in different state of her life and mental condition. Once she is energetic and positively thinking, then involved in some interpersonal relationships and activities, when finally, in last episode, she seams very vulnerable and fragile - completely lost in her overwhelming depression and frustration.

Thank to naturalistic performance of Joan Fitzsimmons, the film conveys the content of multi layered nature, that is - by its esthetics - very close to documentary genera. My idea was to transform a simple, made up story, into an equivalent of genuine documentary film and furthermore into an equivalent of reality. That manoeuvre was very important to me for its reference to contemporary life. Mimicking reality, faking it this or that way, always carrying for details and credibility - are the main features of all my films. That is the way I express my surprise to what I see myself in the surroundings.

http://www.jacekmalinowski.com/



NORMAN LETO
BUTTES MONTEAUX 1



DVD, loop, 2008

[ … ] No, actually we always play ON THE SPOT, we never know what it will be, Norman records test on the camera, we cut out out already recorded songs from that and never correct anything just to allow those to sound the same as when they were played in the room. They are melodious and totally crude. We play them later on during exhibitions or add to movies, although sometimes it happens they really don’t match. Norman says: I do not correct images and I stopped caring about that. Why do I have to correct anything? Why do you correct things, why don’t you quit steering, since physics isn’t in force here? We all know about FREE-DOM. Music, painting, movie and so on, are the only domains of life that you don’t have to care anything about in. However, it’s quite the opposite: I see, I really can see, that we rather do care or rather did care: fashionable -unfashionable, art, painting-smile-paiting -shit, „I AM A CONCEPTUALIST”, „I AM A PAINTER ”, religion, queer, gender, faggot, faget, lesbian, George Bush, provocation, Duchamp, engagement, fashionable -unfashionable, happening, this has already been, or no, this has not , LOOK HOW UNTALENTED I AM or LOOK HOW TALENTED I AM, community, scandal unscandal, I’m going to be a painter, I’m going to be a conceptualist, I am a musician, those scribblers and not-scribblers, the driving force of art, antiglobalist, faget, pop, pop, faggot, cross...Don’t you have any moments when you feel this is NOT THAT, that this - I apologize for the word - that THIS IS FUCKING completely NOT THAT and that’s not the way? That things can occur on some TOTALLY different areas? A real big effort is needed to get out of that swamp. The knowledge about being indefinite is a strict science. Jesus, I really do feel so. A hard fact kills everything in this field, as now playing with fact and categorization is being a very popular pastime. I’m not able to define it precisely, but more or less : Gradually I’m stopping any minding, especially the future, especially me myself and that’s the best kind of emotion. I can see the same happens with the movies, images and music we produce.
You aren’t responsible for anything, you are just given the opportunity of a thorough examining human affairs in terms of error, inefficiency and inconsistency. There’s nothing you have to do, this is a realm rules of which can be developed just by you, and all that angular joke with socially focused art is to be put straight into your ass. You rather should reverse your eyeballs inside. This is the point of origin. I assure you - if you have any core of personality, you are able to find an interesting landscape more likely inside yourself than in anything that surrounds you. So now, confused spectator with rectangular-rimmed glasses, stop taking care of us too. I apologize equivocally for my having broken into a run, I don’t speak too much in general. It’s provocatively punkish to talk a lot in a radical manner about some obvious things. (Be there soft and dispersed, you fucking delegate, if you have the angular landscape and running through it disconcertingly two-dimensional, far too human monkeys)

I do like you all more or less equally, best wishes
Norman Leto

http://www.nova.art.pl/


AGNIESZKA POLSKA
Medical Gymnastics



DVD,8min02’,photographs

“Medical gymnastics” is based on found material from the books about physical activities and touches upon the questions of education, established order and the forces that unsettle it. The procedures that should protect from irregularity and deviation turn themselves into something abnormal, insane and even ridiculous. The thing intended to provide with freedom in fact delivers strange and dangerous order, disturbed by the scenes of massage and touching.

The photographs come from a book about medical gymnastics for children and are modified in Photoshop (clothing removed).




JANEK SIMON
Odlot [Departure]



2003, computer animation, projection

A panoramic view of Krakow from a high building. Towers, churches, cupolas, and expanses of roofs, all familiar and stable. Suddenly, smoke rises around the Ratusz (Old Town Hall Tower), the noise level increases and the tower lifts off and blasts into space under rocket power. All the visible churches are sucked along shortly after. The city is left flat, featureless, unrecognizable, and diminished.

http://www.culture.pl/


GRZEGORZ SZTWIERTNIA
Action painting




Video, 26’24”, 2001/2002

Movie presents daily operations of a person from the lower class of the society (living in a basement) combating with disabilities of his body and reality outside (the stairway inaccessible to people with limited motor ability). The result of this dual strife is a mark – erased belts of the wall over the paneling founded by perennial ritual of “passage” across the area of stairway. Painter's result is a painting “action painting”, monumental work of unnamed painter, whose daily trouble didn’t fail: they stay for the posterity. The film and the whole action end with a small yet significant intervention: the apartment building owner installing a handy banister.

http://www.culture.pl/



JULIAN TOMASZUK
Deconstruction



7 photos from “deconstruction” cycle,
Photography on PCV, 20x15 cm, 2008

Photos represent objects and the aftermath of the spontaneous collaboration between the artist and a group of children. Julian Tomaszuk organized workshops „destruction – construction” during which he inspired children by his creations. The next step was a collaboration in which the children interacted with their toys.
The main purpose of this project was to examine the emotions related to children during destruction of their toys and recombination of remaining parts. The seemingly destructive act led to a wonderful display of creative abilities, analytical skills and abstract thinking.

http://www.artbiznes.pl/


ALICJA ZEBROWSKA
Mystery is looking



video, 1996, 1’40 min

It opens up and reveals a deceptively life-like glass eve. Through inner contractions, pressure and suction, the vagina is able to move the eye, open and close the vaginal lips like eyelids, or oven, in the end, spit the eye out. This game with the eye vagina, that is watching you, is a visual nightmare. In contrast to "Original sin", though, the painted and made-up shaved vagina is more strongly aesthetisized. Nevertheless, the sight of this ogling vagina is not only a shock to the eye. It goes right through the body of the viewer, jolting him to the border of nausia and dread.
Hidden by hair and leading into unknown depths, this silent, dark mystified, protected and, every so often, opening site of desire and yearning turns the dominant cultural code abruptly around, when it stares back. Traditionally, the silent and sightless vagina is taken into possession by the man. The vagina is the object of a seizure. The symbolic centre of all possessive gestures of dominance is the eye, which 'captures' its object. For this reason, the male gaze is phallic. It penetrates. Symbolically, the vagina means nothing other than that the woman is looked upon. She is the object of the gaze. Here. Though, in "The mystery is looking", Alicja Zebrowska turns the central axis of our sexual culture around. By opening its eye, the vagina becomes a subject. This awakening to self-awareness causes shuddering and dread. The gaze is so imprisoned in the schema of male-dominated culture, that the (involuntary) sight of a seeing vagina calls forth a deep-scatted animosity. Seeing the “mystery” cast off its secrecy and through its gaze, itself become a subject, one has the feeling of witnessing a process of emancipation. Nevertheless, it has the effect of a visual monstrosity.
I expect that the eyevagina, especially in its extremely feminine make-up, is also an absurd game, a burlesque masquerade not without wit and laughter. This would be a laughter originating in the grotesque, which is closely related to fear and monstrosity, disgust and pain. And we realize, that Alicja Zebrowska, as a woman, has gone far beyond what the man George Bataille dared to do in that most famous document of pornographic surrealism, "L’histoire de l’oeil" (1928).
http://www.onone.art.pl/


All works are available for sale. For inquiries please contact:



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or




Galeria NOVA
ul. Kochanowskiego 10
(wej_cie od podwórka)
31-127 Kraków

mailto:galerianova@gmail.com


+48 693 404 608
+48 693 404 607
+48 (012) 397 23 98
fax: +48 (012) 397 23 81

http://nova.art.pl/