Tuesday,
23 April
We invite for an exhibition of laureates and finalists the “International Contest for Experiment in Visual Art – ATTEMPT 3”.
The Jury took cognizance of the 88 submissions submitted, which contained, in accordance with the conditions of the contest, one or work or one project. In open voting, the jury qualified 13 artists for the exhibition.
JURY:
- prof. Jarosław Kozłowski – conceptual artist, lecturer at the Art University In Poznan – Jury President,
- prof. Katarzyna Józefowicz – artist, Dean of the Faculty of Sculpture and Intermedia of the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk
- prof. Szymon Wróbel – professor of philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences and at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies “Artes Librales”, University of Warsaw. Psychologist and philosopher interested in contemporary social theory and philosophy of language and mind.
- Jakub Tarasin – artist, lecturer at the Warsaw School of Information Technology.
- Joanna Dudek, PhD – artist, director of the Jan Tarasin City Art Gallery of Kalisz.
AWARDS:
LUDMIŁA KACZMAREK – GRAND PRIX – Award of Mayor of Kalisz 10.000 PLN
The rationale for awarding the GRAND PRIX: for referring to the most important Polish avant-garde traditions and creative interpretation of Władysław Strzemiński’s art.
ANNA PALUSIŃSKA – The Chairman of Town Council Award 5.000 PLN
Rationale for awarding the Chairman of Town Council Award: for attempting to rethink the memory of the Shoah, expressed without distorting the image of the past, and giving justice to the anonymous victims from whom history sought to take away the right to mourn.
IZABELA ŁĘSKA – City Art Gallery of Kalisz Award 2,000 PLN and an individual exhibition in 2018
Justification for awarding the City Art Gallery of Kalisz Award: for innovative use of new technologies in order to rethink our presence in public urban space.
JOINT WINNERS: SYLWIA JAKUBOWSKA-SZYCIK I AGNIESZKA MASTALERZ – Award of the Faculty of Pedagogy and Fine Arts exhibition
Justification for the Award of the Faculty of Pedagogy and Fine Arts: for inviting the viewer to reflect on the fluid relations of power, the seeming strength of the strong and the relative powerlessness of the weak.
ARTISTS:
Dmitrij Buławka–Fankidejski
Sylwia Jakubowska–Szycik
Ludmiła Kaczmarek
Michał Knychaus
Kamila Kornaga
Szymon Kula (object – outside intervention)
Izabela Łęska
Małgorzata Łuczyna and Jacek Złoczowski
Agnieszka Mastalerz
Anna Palusińska
Anna Schmidt
Weronika Teplicka
Jakub Wawrzak
The “International Contest for Experiment in Visual Art – Attempt 3” is organized by the City Art Gallery of Kalisz in cooperation with the City of Kalisz.
The exhibition is under the Honorary Patronage of the Mayer of Kalisz.
Partners:
Faculty of Pedagogy and Fine Arts
Media patronage:
Ludmiła Kaczmarek
AVANT_garde, 2017
Digital application, vector graphics
Avant_garde is an artistic project inspired by avant-garde art. It is a kind of interactive painting inspired by the work of Władysław Strzemiński. The project’s idea is the message “anyone can be an artist.” By writing a story, sentence, word or series of numbers, one can create an original and unique picture. Everyone can become an artist and show his or her work at the exhibition.
To each letter of the keyboard are assigned appropriate graphic elements inspired by Strzemiński’s works (imitating drawing, shape, or color), but transformed and presented with the use of vector graphics. By writing one’s own text on the keyboard, one can create an original and unique image. Drawings are generated at random during the writing of the text, so we are sure that the work will be one of a kind. The project has the form of an interactive application, where the interface acts as a clean canvas.
The work allows the viewer to print the image they have created and place it on the exhibition, which will create a picture gallery. The exhibition will be created with the participation of the audience, who will then become artists. The work is of a relational nature because through the participation of the audience it allows for its own creation.
The idea of the project is play through creating images by means of text. The project aims to disseminate knowledge about avant-garde trends through one’s own actions. Through active participation in creation of the image. The work is to remind about the given trend using the specific forms used in the project.
The application aims to encourage people to participate in creating art by creating their own images. The project envisages the creation of projects concerning other avant-garde trends.
A simplified version of the project’s concept was created during the studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź in the painting studio. Work under the title void draw {} {STRZEMINSKI} (2013/2014) was created at the time in the Processing program, which generated the image using a code. Currently, the work has been modified and improved.
Anna Palusińska
Identities, 2017
Digital prints of archival photographs probably taken by Wilhelm Brasse, salt crystals; 10×15 cm
Identities is a cycle, which consists of portraits of women imprisoned in Auschwitz Concentration Camp. Portraits were created by the photographer Wilhelm Brasse, who as a prisoner of the camp was assigned by the Nazis to carry out camp documentation.
People portrayed by Brasse are deprived of their own autonomy, their individuality is reduced to the assigned number and prison clothes, which were part of the camp machine depriving people of life and their identity.
In the project, fragments of archival portraits of women, thanks to the crystallization process, are covered with salt crystals. Crystals growing on fragments of photos related to the concentration camp are an attempt to heal those marked images. Women on the described photographs are perceived as prisoners.
The process of crystallization is an attempt to return to the individual’s identity and break with the way of presenting these people only as subsequent prisoners. Salt crystals, a symbol of purification, allow one to look at selected photographs not through the prism of the prisoner, but as an individual with her own life, freedom and autonomous personality.
The crystallization process violates the structure of the images, thanks to which it reinterprets the image of the photographs. In the created works, the main attention is directed at the portrayed human, without the accompanying stigma of the concentration camp.
Izabela Łęska
Subjective walks, 2014
36 black and white prints of digital drawings and descriptions of walks in A4 format
Every day I go out into the city and give in to its rhythm. I delight in the very act of walking, while recording the course of each walk on the map. As a result, a kind of recording is created in the form of a linear image, which also becomes a form of a city drawing.
At certain moments of space-time the city spits out subtle signals and becomes the source of further decisions. I am referring to the surrealist concept of an objective chance. The decision to follow something, even very elusive, gives vent to internal impulses that coexist with reality. I follow the circonstancielle magic, or occasional magic, and collect objets trouvés (found items).
Walking is as natural as breathing, and every elemental decision whether to go right or left or whether to dare to follow someone or something, determines the final form of the drawing. I can be inspired by a man, junk on the sidewalk, a word spoken in a foreign language. What becomes a possibility in one case and develops a network of subsequent solutions at the same time closes others.
The work was created during a residency at the Institut für Alles Mögliche in Berlin.
Sylwia Jakubowska-Szycik
Kingsize/Transformation, 2014-2017
Installation, plastic figurines, color part, black part – covered with acrylic paint, silver part – aluminum imitation, height from 1 to 20 cm, surface of about 6-9m2 depending on the density
The installation consists of many plastic figures. The colored part, the black part is covered with acrylic paint, the silver part is an imitation of aluminum.
The installation has been created since 2014 and with each exposure its other, more developed version is revealed. It started with a collection of colorful figurines – expressions of characters from children’s tales, pseudo-heroes of computer games and other creatures building a fictitious image of the world. Later, most of the figures were painted black, the colors were subdued, the glaze and the exterior gave way to the form. The last part are figurines flooded with aluminum mass (imitation), devoid of form, showing the possibilities of shapeless form – the image of changing societies…
Installation works in different configurations depending on the context of the place, sometimes the topic. It is a trial, an experiment, another experience of the place. As a road, a game, the form of the circle tightening its center is subject to constant change and development. The next transformation will determine the next place, co-participation, an external factor.
Agnieszka Mastalerz
Untitled/Remote control, 2017
Thermograms, 9x30x40 cm
The topographic series of thermograms presents the places where influential decisions were/are made. The method of imaging reverses the relationship between the state and the individual, changes the direction of control and observation. It resembles night-vision, aiming at a target. Thermography works in the infrared band, it registers thermal radiation emitted by physical bodies. The thermal imaging camera used in the project makes it possible to see the construction of influential objects with generally limited accessibility – their organisms and tissues.
A small scale of gray distracts attention from the power of the symbols of power captured within the frame. The mock-up looks of the captured objects makes them unrealistic and simplified, while the uniform print format universalizes them. The inspiration for the visual decision were the monochromatic paintings by Luc Tuymans, for the significance – the sculptures of Thomas Demand. The focal point of each thermogram is an architectural example of the embodiment of power. The cycle refers to the human – as a determinant and subject.
Dmitrij Buławka–Fankidejski
Metamorphosis from the series of paintings Questions about space, 2015–2017
Sculpture, water lenses about 14 cm in diameter
The transparent object has a spatial universe. It can be found in every place, because this is where the place always becomes an inseparable element of the image focused in the lens. Vision becomes the matter that permeates. It is important for me to look through a shell and the image penetrating through it. The objects partially penetrate into the space of water lenses I created. This is a kind of “experimental recording.” The sculptures are subjected to the test of time, among other things, the material degradation process (destruction by corrosion). The space in the lenses becomes a capsule closed to the outside atmosphere. The interior is limited to one environment with limited resources. Paradoxically, an aquatic environment conducive to corrosion and destruction can become a safe space. The lens disturbs the full, real reception of the interior of the objects.
The composition entitled Metamorphosis from the Questions about space series consists of eleven sculptures. They are water lenses with a diameter of about 14 cm each, with a differently sculpted outer surface and interior. Water lenses are my own technique for making sculptural objects. I made metal parts of these capsules in wax and then cast them in bronze and zinc. The inside structures are the result of working on the outer surface. The metal parts of the objects have a kind of collar, to which I attach a lens made of flexible PVC and a shaped to form a convex lens. By means of a valve placed in the foil, I inject water inside, which finally shapes the lens and the internal space of the object. These structures and the internal space of the lenses grow. The real sense of proportion gets lost, the interior becomes larger and occupies the outer surface of the lens. The diverse selection of materials and internal structures is the surface for the ever-changing optical and sensory processes and the effective process that takes place inside the degrading metal. The objects have been closed for a year and a half and are a testimony to the ongoing change of the internal environment with limited resources.
Michał Knychaus
Identified object, 2016
40x40x 5cm aluminum cast + an interactive 3D model displayed on a tablet
Preview of the interactive model to be displayed on the tablet: skfb.ly/6qtKO//
The object identified is an aluminum cast showing, on a smaller scale, the foundation of a building located in Poznań at the Kosmonautów housing development. This remnant is a material testimony to the old house that deteriorated and was also subject to dispersion over time. Earlier settled by its owners, it was the object of human interaction – inanimate matter. After having been abandoned, it became a shelter for the homeless, and the construction of a housing estate planned for 2016 assumes the extraction of its remains and total destruction. Personally having lived in a block of flats at the Kosmonautów estate in 2013-2015, I witnessed the last phase of its operation. The remains of the walls and the roof, which were the shelter from the wind, were used by the homeless as a temporary shelter. To get rid of unwanted “tenants” – the city ordered the demolition of all elements protruding above the ground level. Only a concrete foundation survived – relatively small in confrontation with the surrounding skyscrapers. When I learned about the plans to build a neighborhood parking lot and demolish this foundation, I decided to document it. I used the DJI drone – the leading producer of this type of technology. Using special software and applications dedicated to this machine, I managed to capture the remnants of the building in the form of a digital code and recreate it as a 3D object. Point cloud – scanning effect, was used to transcode it into a triangle grid. The triangle grid is a raw 3D model, devoid of texture and color, containing information about the shape of the foundation and its immediate surroundings resembling the abstract surface of some distant planet or a satellite photograph of the remains of ancient civilizations. The resulting digital matrix confirms the thesis already contained in Baudrillard’s considerations concerning the simulacrum process – the simulacra can exist autonomously, and the context-free real counterparts are a value in themselves.[1] Soon, the prototype of the matrix will be dug up and destroyed, and the only thing left will be a handful of photos and my photogrammetric scan. Therefore, I decided to work on the principle of reverse archeology – fabricate the material equivalent of the foundation, which will survive and in the future, on the basis of more advanced scans of the artistic object, it will be possible to recreate the computer matrix first, and then the foundation itself. First, I milled a three-dimensional object in an oak board, and then cast it out of aluminum. The choice of metal was obvious. Aluminum is easily accessible and durable, and at the same time reflects the appearance of the 3D model. Additionally, in the foundry process it behaves very plastically, which makes it possible to obtain the highest accuracy, which is important in the case of physical reproduction of a photogrammetric scan. The object thus created is a kind of archaeological key, but it is also a materialized digital code of the computer matrix. The reduced scale facilitates its storage, and the accuracy of the mapping allows to maintain a very high quality of the smallest details.
Kamila Kornaga
Encased in glass, 2016-2017
Fusing, 48 samples with dimensions of 10x10cm
The scholar does not examine nature because it is useful. He studies it because it gives him pleasure; this, in turn, finds its source in the beauty of nature. If it were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and life would not be worth the trouble […]. I mean the deep, hidden beauty that results from the harmonious ordering of its individual parts and which can be captured by pure intelligence.
Henri Poincaré, Science and Method, 1911
My overriding intention is to establish and be able to observe the undeniable correlation between art and science, a correlation that has its origins in the ancient principle of the unity of truth and beauty. Looking for inspiration, I decided to focus on the simplest things, on the basics, on food. I focus on food – essential for life, for proper functioning. At present I do not have time to celebrate something that was once a pretext for a meeting, conversation, joy. I postpone it for later, like my other needs. It’s so simple – to eat. Being happy that I have something to eat. That I have someone to eat with. In order to realize the uniqueness of this activity, I decided to present selected, favorite fruits of nature in unusual depiction, unknown from the shops’ advertising shots – though I do not claim that it is unknown at all.
The presented glass samples are the result of an experiment with organic matter and glass. The motivation of the experience was the desire to place ordinary substances known in everyday life in a different context. Salt, bread, sugar or earth in various configurations are closed in glass and due to the high temperature they burn and melt between two panes with dimensions of 10×10 cm, creating bizarre, abstract paintings that cannot be observed on a day to day basis.
The whole process was a new experience for me. An experience in three senses of the word – as an experiment and acquired knowledge, experience of visual structure by touch and experience as a consciousness of the moment.
Szymon Kula
Dummy, 2017
Installation: canvas, acrylic emulsion, wooden frame; 210x300x180cm
The Dummy project is an installation/object in the form of a canvas tent, the surface of which has been covered with a painted texture. The applied patterns and the shape of the object give it the appearance of a stereotypical cottage. In its characteristics, Dummy has features that are exactly opposite to those which we have assumed to be associated with the function of home. In everyday life, we understand buildings as a permanent reference point, its fixedness lies at the basis of our understanding of the home as such. Dummy, on the other hand, in its assumption is a portable object, a house with movable walls. The structure is devoid of an entrance, thus the interior remains undiscovered, provoking the observer to formulate speculations and hypotheses. As Gaston Bachelard writes in his canonical book The Poetics of Space, “The house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” By alluding to the motif of home, Dummy also fits into the current discussion on nomadism and exile. Paradoxically, despite the technological progress, the rate of people deprived of the most basic place of residence is still growing. In a broader sense, the project questions the invariability of categories that we take for granted. Referring directly to the ideas associated with everyday existence, it raises the motive of the basic need for shelter and its impact on the civilizational development of humanity. In this sense, the realization refers to the thoughts of American transcendentalists, headed by Henry Thoreau, who wrote “Our houses are such unwieldy property, that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them. While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them.” Equipped with a wooden frame, Dummy is a self-supporting structure, compressing itself and decomposing on the principle of a tent. The project is displayed independently from the walls of the gallery, allowing the audience to view the object from all sides.
Małgorzata Łuczyna, Jacek Złoczowski
Memory Morph, 2017 (in process)
3D model and website based on the Google Street View application www.memorymorph.pl
Memory Morph is a work in process that was created specifically for the needs of the TANCEBA project and exhibition carried out at Galeria Bielska BWA in 2017 (the exhibition lasted from May 11 to June 22, 2017). In the years 1881-1939, a synagogue destroyed by the Germans in September 1939 stood in the place of the current Galeria Bielska BWA. In the 1960s, the gallery building was built on its rubble. In Memory Morph, we refer to the history of the place where the gallery is located, and at the same time we create a more universal approach based on the concept of “memory of the place” – we examine the phenomenon of creating the identity of the place and building up meanings related to space.
The work uses a technique of morphing for fluid and automatic processing of elements in computer programs. At the same time, this technique was deliberately used based on incorrect data. The transformation was subjected to two completely separate and not visually binding 3D models: the building of the BWA Gallery in Bielsko-Biała and the synagogue building in Szombathely in Hungary. We used this building because the architectural design of the Hungarian synagogue was the archetype for the twin Jewish prayer house in Bielsko. Such a procedure made the graphic program unable to properly interpret the data and correctly perform the morphing operation. As a result of such a process, the gallery building was deformed, not displaying a smooth transition from one shape to the other. Thus created imperfect and deformed 3D model has been incorporated into the graphics used in the Google Street View application. The viewer – the user of the application, walking virtually along the streets around the gallery, can become a witness to this gradual transformation or rather deformation of the building’s form. The popular Google app becomes a field condemned to the failure of confronting two blocks, two architectural orders and cultural symbols.
For the purpose of this project a website (www.memorymorph.pl) was created, which can also be run using a QR code. Publishing the code on the Internet and using the stickers and postcards will help users reach the website.
Memory Morph is a part of the TANCEBA exhibition, however, this work can function independently in both meaning (due to the universal approach to the phenomenon) and physical sense (thanks to the website that can function independently of the exhibition).
The next stage of the project implementation was planned for the month of May 2017, reproducing a large-scale QR code on the roof of the Bielsko Gallery. We expect that in the future such a move will create an opportunity to reach the memorymorph.pl site by random users of Google satellite maps. This will not only extend the duration of the project, but also create the possibility of encountering the project by random users who, interested in an unusual element in urban space, will scan the QR code and thus be transferred from one virtual space (satellite maps) to the space processed by the artists (memorymorph). Importantly – it will still be the same space, around the BWA Gallery building, but processed because it will have been filtered in a sense through the historical context of the place.
This stage of work is a completely experimental move, because we are not able to determine if and when users will actually be able to see the QR code on the gallery roof. In the first place – you have to wait for the next update of Google satellite maps (we do not have data on the planned date of the update). In addition, we do not know how much the quality of satellite images will improve and whether at the next update of the map will be available in scale and resolution large enough to make scanning of the code possible. However, taking into account the constantly growing Google applications, we can count on the fact that in the future our code will be readable.
So one can compare this action to throwing a message in a bottle into the sea and waiting for a response that may never come.
concept and implementation: Małgorzata Łuczyna & Jacek Złoczowski
IT cooperation: Grzegorz Łuczyna
Anna Schmidt
Reconstruction, 2017
Installation, modeling clay; 3x photograph 70×100 cm, object 50x50x150 cm
The Reconstruction project is my attempt to face such phenomena as memories and imagination.
In my opinion, these are states that very often intertwine with each other, constantly building an image of our past life.
The idea for the project came to my mind when I was told a memory of someone’s early school years, the hero of which was given for birthday a model of one of the Polish monuments commemorating the heroes of the Second World War, made of cheap plastic. This event was so surprising for a boy of several years that he remembers it after 30 years, whereas when he began to recall more detailed details of his memory, e.g. the type of plastic that was typically used for toys in the times of the People’s Republic of Poland, we started to wonder how many of these details they are a memory, and as much of is imagined.
Reconstruction is my free interpretation of the boyish memory, which became a pretext for me to show it in a perverse way to a wider audience.
The design is kept in a very bright tone based mainly on white and chiaroscuro. The project consists of two elements. The first of them is the model of the monument I have recreated. The second element of the project are photographs, which in their subject matter also refer to the world of boyish memories – playing with models of soldiers.
I made the model of the monument in a well-known material from childhood – plasticine. The model is exhibited in a case that, through its specific construction, imposes a view of the miniature on the viewer – just as we cannot see memories (they will always be a form of imagination in which certain details that have evaded us over time are complemented by the products of our imagination), so we are not able to see the object placed in the display case. Its walls were made of frosted glass revealing only the outline of the object behind it. Magnifying glasses have been embedded in the walls that allow the viewer to look inside, while the image they reveal is very fragmented and distorted. Our curiosity is not fully satisfied, we are not completely sure what we see, and from each of the observed fragments, each observer will create a completely different picture.
Photographs are also based on a specific imaging method – the use of macro photography and a very shallow depth of field makes the frames we are watching very oneiric, we lose the sense of scale, we do not have a point of reference to reality. In our awareness, toy soldiers are small objects that also appear in larger, uniformed “formations” – my toy soldiers are lonely heroes. Thanks to the fact that we can see them individually, we have the opportunity to look at their individuality and uniqueness.
My intention is for the viewer to perceive, on the one hand, certain things anew, on the other, for the seemingly obvious things to become not so obvious.
Weronika Teplicka
Provisional States II, 2016
Acrylic paint, oil on canvas
The work Temporary States II consists of 7 painting elements/objects. This is a selection from my activities started in 2016. Each object was made of one of my earlier paintings, rejected and unaccepted, taken off the painting loom and stored. This is how a set of unsuccessful images from 2013-2015 was created. I mechanically cut out of them even stripes, glued them together, then squeezed in the press, wanting to compress them, and change their state. The work is an attempt to show images unsuitable for exposure in a supposedly more acceptable form.
Jakub Wawrzak
Memory, 2017
Installation
Philosophers and theorists of perception, referring to the issue of virtual images, relations between images and the phenomenon of “projection,” use a variety of concepts that undoubtedly share a common thesis. It is very well described in the words of Henri Bergson: Perception is completely imbued with images – memories that complement it, interpreting it at the same time.
The culture of media images, in which we operate, constantly changes the way of recalling and forming the memory material. The visual formulas proper to these paintings penetrate the structure of memories, modifying them irretrievably. I try to apply my experiences and reflections connected with it directly to the visual content of the project and the formal means used. I place them on the level of relation between the work and the audience.
The diorama (the second object from the left), which is a very precise, miniature reconstruction of the place depicted in the photograph, was made of a homogeneous and solid material, with an accuracy of tenths of a millimeter, in the 1:15 scale. Here I clean the structure of the textures specific to individual materials and unify the color, using white PVC which reflects the entire spectrum of light cast on the object. At the same time, white is the most subjective color in reception.
The presence of photographs (the fourth object from the left) undoubtedly makes the miniature diorama real, seemingly confirms the authenticity of the place, additionally embedding it in a given context. At the same time, the optics of the apparatus and the character of the staging deriving from the language of film and painting remain in the sphere of an extremely subjective interpretation. It borders on the dreamlike world of fantasy.
The animation, displayed in the first rectangular prism, presents a digital model of the room, which enabled the execution of individual elements of the mock-up using a CNC milling machine.
The third cuboid contains a photograph of the model made using the same optical parameters (aperture and focal length of the lens) that I used to create a photographic portrait of the woman.
As part of the observation of individual media, which I combine in the project, the relation between scale and optics, as well as between medium and perception become unique to me. Thanks to holes made in cuboids, I impose a specific perspective of reception, eliminating the feeling of small scale. When you look through the gap, the interior of the object fills almost the entire field of view.