Art Full Stop – a new project

The space of a gallery is a space of a safe meeting of art with a viewer. Art institutions still have the power of marking what is creative and controlling the reception of the artwork. The City Art Gallery of Kalisz decides to leave the comfort zone and confront with anonymous public. Art in public spaces loses its distance which is typical for galleries. An unexpected direct encounter with it may be an important experience for accidental viewers. Leaving the frames of an institution by the artwork and entering into the public space allows us to negate the previously encoded so called “correct reactions” and “correct understanding”. We want the space of Kalisz to become the real place where art starts to exist, that’s why we suggest the inhabitants to wait with art. By accident. Briefly. For a while.

For the entire year on the bus stops in the center of the town we will present artworks. The majority of them will be site-specific. To the meeting with the inhabitants of Kalisz we invited both artists who are experienced at presenting their art in public spaces and those who would like to challenge it. Altogether we will listen to the voice of the public – uncensored and uncontrolled by the institution.

The first work that we will present at the bus stops in Kalisz will be the Ritual Mask 01 by Przemysław Branas.

“The photo is the effect of an intensive and constant search within my own apartment for ritual. It is an expression of how I strive aesthetically as well as a search for new subjects; I am interested in the topic of change and transformation and I am also interested in the political associations in connection with the food products that I use (like for example bananas). For me the photograph is an act of work by a performer, not by a photographer, the aesthetic documentation of a broader action at my own home – of a performance.” – says Branas about his work.

The photograph is part of the series Hiccups presented during a solo exhibition by the artist at MOCAK in Kraków, during the Photo Month 2014.

Przemysław Branas – a student of Interdisciplinary Doctoral Studies at the University of Arts in Poznań and a graduate from the Intermedia Department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. He is active at the edge of various media and constantly breaks their structures. He uses performance art, photography, video, installation and scientific research.

“I locate my artistic practice like an island within various worlds. This cosmopolitan kind of being interests me more than the idea of the globe – the opposition of the local versus the global is too close to sociology and does not allow one to focus on the geography of the phenomena. I consciously reach for various kinds of aesthetics and do not want to get attached to any of them. The untamed, the alien, the borrowed and used in concrete statements, are treated as a means of expression. An aestheticization is a political tool because it allows one to move the more subconscious or displaced content and thus has a bigger potential to activate the viewer than the open structuring of a strictly political language.”

Curator: Małgorzata Kaźmierczak