12.09.2014 (Friday)
18.00 – 22.00
The collection, consisting of objects by Tadeusz Kantor, will be open to public. Also, the exhibition Nothing Twice will explore the problem of the object as a stage prop and the role it occupies in contemporary performance art. Artist Oskar Dawicki will count visitors on the occasion of the new Cricoteka's opening. In the evening we invite you to join us for a DJ set by Nick Hallett and B.Y.O.B. (Bring Your Own Beamer) event. ● Entrance free.
13.09.2014 (Saturday)
11.00 – 21.00
The exhibition will be open to the public till late evening. ● Entrance free.
13.09.2014 (Saturday)
12.00
Marvin Gaye Chetwynd will encourage the audience to animate dioramas, which are part of the exhibition. ● Duration: 45 mins. Registration required.
13.09.2014 (Saturday)
13.00
The artists and curator Joanna Zielińska will show the audience around the Nothing Twice exhibition. ● Duration: 45 mins. Registration required.
13.09.2014 (Saturday)
18.00
Jaap Blonk will perform Kurt Schwitter’s Ursonate and a fragment of Guy de Cointet’s novel Espahor Ledet Ko Uluner! Written in a language invented by the artist, the book was published under the pseudonym Qei No Mysxdod in 1973. Courtesy of the Guy de Cointet Estate and Air de Paris, Paris. © All rights reserved. ● Duration: 45 mins. Tickets required.
13.09.2014 (Saturday)
19.00
An opera in one act by American artist Shana Moulton and musician Nick Hallett with the participation of soprano Marzena Lubaszka. The protagonist is Cynthia, suffering from all types of phobia. The girl is wandering through hallucinatory and fairy-tale landscapes in the style of the artist’s previous works. The performance is part of the Whispering Pines cycle, going on since 2002. ● Duration: 45 mins. Tickets required.
13.09.2014 (Saturday)
20.00
In April, American artist Michael Portnoy told 100 Beautiful Jokes to his audience in Amsterdam. The film presented in Cricoteka is a special recording of that afternoon. The project is carried out in collaboration with the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. ● Duration: 45 mins. Tickets required.
14.09.2014 (Sunday)
14.00
Jaap Blonk, an outstanding musician and performer, will conduct a workshop for those who want to develop their vocal skills. The artist employs playful methods with elements of improvisation or drama. ● Duration: 3 hrs. Registration required.
14.09.2014 (Sunday)
18.00 and 19.30
The second in the series of theatrical projects by Catherine Sullivan using 'found' stage performances. The project employs the techniques of readymades, appropriation and collage. The performance is realised in collaboration with the Opera Buffa Theatre in Warsaw under the management of Katarzyna Wińska. Participants: Maciej Czerwiński, Piotr Glikson, Renata Luciak, Zofia Marczak, Jan Małkowski, Zygmunt Osmołowski, Mariola Przybyłowska, Antoni Talko-Porzecki, Hanna Sokołowska, Małgorzata Sokołowska, Tadeusz Strumiłło. With additional performance by Beata Pilch and Bogdan Renczyński. Special thanks to: Bagatela Theatre, Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Foksal Gallery Foundation, Theatre Institute and Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. ● Duration: 45 mins. Tickets required.
Marvin Gaye Chetwynd combines two different productions: a puppet play Jesus and Barabbas and a performance piece The King with elements from the film The Dresser (1983) and a 'fire' costume designed by Inigo Jones. The action has resulted from her cooperation with a group of performance artists from Kraków and the UK. The soundtrack of the spectacle includes sounds of a thunder storm performed live, a piece of a song by the Alibabki group as well as a percussion remix by Jędrzej Cichosz. Presenting, amongst others: Marta Bakst, Jacob Blandy, Richard Whitby, Jaśmina Polak, Joonas Kalervo Valkama, Janek Sobolewski, Tomek Wlosok, Ania Antoniewicz, Bartek Cabaj● Duration: 20 mins. Tickets required.
11.10.2014 (Saturday)
20.30
Guy de Cointet’s works relied on text. The objects he made were often used as stage props or set designs in his theatrical performances. His works are usually literary puzzles whose protagonists are mostly women. Three of de Cointet’s performance acts will be performed for the first time in Poland by Mary Ann Duganne Glicksman: Two Drawings (1974), My Father’s Diary (1975), Going to the Market (1979). There will be a conversation with the performer at the end of the evening. The project has been realised in collaboration with the 39th Krakow Theatrical Reminiscences, courtesy of the Guy de Cointet Estate and Air de Paris, Paris. © All rights reserved. ● Duration: 45 mins. Tickets required.
15 – 16.11.2014
22 – 23.11.2014
12.00
Discover the exciting potential of making large-scale 3D sculptures out of your favourite 2D images. Inspired by the work of Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan, you will create larger-than-life sculptures. The workshop is spread over two sessions. Classes will be conducted in Polish and English. ● Age: 6 –10. Duration: 2 hrs. Registration required.
Nothing Twice is the first project in Poland to combine an exhibition and performance action on such a large scale. This event is being organized to mark the launching of Cricoteka’s new building.
Some of the works presented at the exhibition refer directly to the history of the theatre, such as the curtain made by Ulla van Brandenburg or Jim Shaw’s installation that incorporates a theater backdrop. The exhibition will open with an object by Tadeusz Kantor—Aneantisising Machine (The Madman and the Nun, 1963)—a link between the exhibition of the Kantor Collection and the exhibition of contemporary art.
Some of the works presented at the exhibition refer directly to the history of the theatre, such as the curtain made by Ulla von Brandenburg or Jim Shaw’s installation that incorporates a theatrical horizon. The exhibition will open with an object by Tadeusz Kantor—his aneantisising machine (The Madman and the Nun, 1963)—a link between the exhibition of the Kantor Collection and the exhibition of contemporary art. The opening ceremony will include a performance by Oskar Dawicki, concert by Jaap Blonk, Michael Portnoy’s film, Shana Moulton’s and Nick Hallett’s opera and Catherine Sullivan’s theatre piece, produced in collaboration with the Warsaw Opera Buffa theatre.
12 September – 23 November 2014
Cricoteka, Centre for the Documentation of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor, Kraków
Curator: Joanna Zielińska
Paweł Althamer
(born in 1967) is based in Warsaw. He works primarily in sculpture, video, performance actions, and installation. Althamer’s work is engaged and interactive. He often works collaboratively with other artists, communities and his audience. He transformed his exhibition, Frühling, at the Museum Fridericianum in Kassel to the schoolchildren. In 2000, he orchestrated a large-scale group performance in which he asked the residents of a large tower block in Warsaw's Bródno district to turn their lights either on or off so they formed the pattern '2000'. This mix of art, community and transformation of everyday settings continues on an even grander scale with Althamer’s project, Common Task, which he began in 2008. For Common Task, Althamer travelled with family and friends to Belgium, Brazil, and Mali to create interventions in daily realities. Since 1994, Althamer has led the Grupa Nowolipie, a weekly sculpture workshop. The group meets at the State Art Centre in Nowolipki Street in the district of Wola in Warsaw. For MS sufferers, ceramic workshops constitute a form of rehabilitation and therapy. Together they have created a sculpture entitled Sylwia, amongst others, which adorns a fountain in the Sculpture Park of the district of Bródno as well as the City Hall Park in NYC. FOTO
Jaap Blonk
(born 1953) lives in the Netherlands. He is a self-taught composer, performer and poet. In the late 1970s he took the saxophone and started to compose music. A few years later he discovered his potential as a vocal performer, at first in reciting poetry and later on in improvisations and his own compositions. For almost two decades the voice was his main means for the discovery and development of new sounds. As a vocalist, Jaap Blonk is unique for his powerful stage presence and almost childlike freedom in improvisation, combined with a keen grasp of structure. With the use of live electronics, he has extended the scope and range of his concerts considerably. On several occasions he collaborated with visual computer artist Golan Levin. Blonk's work for radio and television includes several commissioned radio plays. FOTO
Ulla von Brandenburg
(born in 1974) currently lives in Paris. Her works explore a wide range of media including film, drawing, installation and performance. Brandenburg’s practice reflects her training in set design and the visual arts and is inspired by a wide range of historical elements, many reverting back to the late 19th century, sourced from literature, the visual arts, expressionist theatre, Hollywood films, photography, chess and magic, as well as pre-Freudian psychoanalysis. One of her favourite forms is shadow theatre or tableau vivant, or 'living picture', popular in the 18th century, combining elements of art and theatre with models posed to form a motionless picture. Many of her installations use the architecture of a given place. She uses fabrics—patchwork curtains—to create fanciful theatrical spaces. FOTO
Marvin Gaye Chetwynd
(b. 1973) lives in Glasgow. She has realized a number of exhibitions and performances throughout Europe over the past ten years with her travelling band of amateur actors. Utilizing handmade costumes and sets, her work draws on a wide range of influences from film and television, literature, art history, and philosophy. Chetwynd uses a variety of historical theatrical forms, from Brechtian drama to puppet shows, often within the same performance. The result is an experience that is accessible, humorous, and disorienting. Chetwynd initially studied anthropology and uses the idea of bricolage as both a physical practice and as the organizing principle to bring together the disparate images and characters within her work. The carnivalesque world she creates is one in which figures like the Emperor Nero, Mae West, Karl Marx, and Jabba the Hutt can comfortably—if not peacefully—coexist. The informality of Chetwynd’s performances and the effortless mix of high and low sources make them remarkably democratic spaces for exploring ideas about history, class and contemporary culture. FOTO
Guy de Cointet
During Krakow Theatrical Reminiscences, three performances by Guy de Cointet will be presented, performed by Mary Ann Glicksman. The evening will be rounded off with an encounter with the participation of Mary Ann Glicksman and Hal Glicksman. In the performance Two Drawings (1974), the starting point of the plot is the purchase of a drawing with an unusual shape. Once she has scrutinised it closely at home, the protagonist is obliged to conclude that the modest drawing is strange. More, it is very strange indeed, just as strange as quite a different drawing… My Father’s Diary (1975) is the story of a certain precious book filled with text, signs, diagrams and drawings that a father hands over to his daughter on his death bed. Unfortunately, the father dies before he has a chance to explain what makes the volume special. The protagonist presents the book to the audience, together with the follow-up to the story. In the performance Going to the Market (1979), the main prop is a painting with colourful edging against a homogenous white background, which has been covered at randomly placed letters. Randomly? Perhaps not quite… In fact, not at all so. During just a few minutes, the performer explains the point of the story contained in this work.
The project has been realised in collaboration with the 39th Krakow Theatrical Reminiscences. Courtesy of the Guy de Cointet Estate and Air de Paris.
Guy de Cointet (1934–83) was a French-born artist based in California. He created text and sculptural works, often combining them as props and stage sets in theatrical performance pieces. His work is considered as the lost link of conceptualism and a connection with the achievement of avant-garde movements. In his activities, he directly referred to Raymond Russell and Stéphane Mallarmé, he also liked Marcel Duchamp’s linguistic puzzles. He spent his childhood in Algeria, where he attended school together with Yves Saint Laurent. At first, he was involved in the fashion industry. In the mid-1960s, he left for New York, where he was a regular visitor to Andy Warhol’s Factory. He settled down in Los Angeles. He was fascinated with cryptography as well as the nature of writing and language. He researched Egyptian writing, African culture and the Navajo Indians. He was always very sensitive to colour. Guy de Cointet hardly ever selected male actors for his performances. He preferred working with women of various ethnic origins. One of his pieces was made in collaboration with Viva from Warhol’s Factory. FOTO
Mary Ann Glicksman (b. 1943 in Tacoma, Washington USA) lives in Ymeray, France. Activism for the rights of people with disabilities and art are the two threads that have twined throughout her life between California and Paris. Guy de Cointet and Mary Ann Glicksman began their friendship and collaboration in 1976, which continued until his death in 1983. During these years, she interpreted his monologues, and with other actors played in his theatrical pieces in galleries, museums, universities and theaters across the United States. In 2006, After a silence of 25 years, Mary Ann and other actors have continued to represent his work.
Hal Glicksman (b. 1937 in Beverly Hills, California) curated a number of key exhibitions in Southern California during the 1960s and 1970s, and helped establish and foster several important Southern California art institutions. He exhibited the work of Guy de Cointet at the University of California in 1973 and Otis Art Institute in 1975. He met Mary Ann during her first performance of Guy de Cointet in 1976. They married in 1978.
Nick Hallett
(b. 1974) is a composer, vocalist, and cultural producer. Whispering Pines 10, an opera collaboration with artist Shana Moulton, has been staged at The Kitchen, SFMOMA, and The Warhol Museum among others, and is currently being adapted for the Internet. He is the Music Director and producer of the Joshua Light Show, a team of live cinema artists with roots in the 1960s psychedelia movement. Hallett held the first Re:New Re:Play artist residency at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in May 2009 which focused on the singing voice as artistic medium, and his work was featured in the 2007 and 2009 Performa biennials. As a vocalist, Hallett has performed in operas by Anthony Braxton and Susie Ibarra, in addition to staging adventurous interpretations of works by Meredith Monk and Karlheinz Stockhausen. From 2000 – 2003, he led the video / performance-art band Plantains. Hallett is currently working on a new musical score for choreographer Bill T. Jones to premiere in 2015. FOTO
Oskar Dawicki
Oskar Dawicki was educated as a painter, but already during his studies he became interested in performance art, which he remained faithful to during the following years. In 2000, he broadened his scope of interest onto video works, photography, documentation and, finally, objects and installations. All of his works have a post-conceptual character and emanate a slightly grotesque, ironic and even absurd aura. Dawicki joins in his works a romantically-tragic component (highly saturated with his own existential dilemmas) with poetics and the critical dimension of conceptual art. The self-reflection over his own institutional status as a contemporary artist is tightly interwoven with reflection on his own identity, or rather on its transitoriness, conventionality, airiness and weakness. Discomfort, disagreement, complication—these are the terms on which this artist's imagination is founded, while the non-productivity of art seems to Dawicki to be its most promising aspect. FOTO
Jens Hoffmann
(born in 1974) lives in New York. He is a writer and exhibition maker. He is currently Deputy Director of The Jewish Museum in New York, where he oversees exhibitions, collections, and public programs. He has curated more than 50 exhibitions internationally and written more than 200 texts on art and exhibition making. From 2002 to 2006 Hoffmann was the director of exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and from 2007 to 2012 he was director of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, where he also directed Capp Street Project an artist in residence program established in 1983 dedicated to the creation and presentation of new art installations. FOTO
Tadeusz Kantor
(1915–1990) lived and worked in Kraków. He was one of the most significant Polish artists of the 20th century. A visual artist who was also active in the performing arts, he is regarded as a pioneering theatre reformer, influenced by the ideas of avant-garde artists. For Kantor, his biography and Galician origins constituted an important point of reference, which is particularly observable in his later plays, e.g. Dead Class or Wielopole, Wielopole. Already as a child, he wished to create 'an image that would move'. He believed that the motif of wandering was a metaphor for his work. His theatrical work was inseparably connected with his visual pieces. Kantor produced a great number of theoretical writings on his artistic practice, including numerous manifestoes, in which he divided his work into periods relating to transformations of his various concepts. World tours with his Cricot 2 Theatre (formed in the mid-1950s) brought Tadeusz Kantor worldwide fame in the 1970s. In 1980, he established Cricoteka—'Live Archive' of the Cricot 2 Theatre, still exists. FOTO
Shana Moulton
(born in 1976) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She creates evocatively oblique narratives in her video and performance works. For Shana Moulton biography is crucial, she draws from children’s imagination and adolescence. She gains inspiration from children’s television programmes, American popular culture and daily iconography. Combining an unsettling, wry humour with a low-tech, Pop sensibility, Moulton plays a character whose interactions with the everyday world are both mundane and surreal, in a domestic sphere just slightly askew. As her protagonist navigates the enigmatic and possibly magical properties of her home decor, Moulton initiates relationships with objects and consumer products that are at once banal and uncanny. FOTO
Paulina Ołowska
(b. 1976) lives in Raba Niżna and Kraków. She is interested in private mythologies and phantasmagorical narratives at the fringes of the official discourse; her works are situated between the private and the 'official' history. In her projects, the artist criticises modernist narratives; she examines the gaps in the history of avant-garde movements and the links between art and politics, between fashion and design. The artist likes to combine installation, painting, objects, objet trouvé, archival materials and fragments of museum collections as well as performance acts. On the one hand, she is driven by a 'nostalgic impulse', on the other, by the nature of the local story which she wants to tell. Ołowska employs ceramics, sewing, pattern-making, handicrafts—all skills which traditionally served as a 'cover' for female creativity. The artist frequently takes up the theme of the female artist in her studio, demonstrating her private enchantment with such artists as Zofia Stryjeńska, Pauline Boty or Alina Szapocznikow. Although she has gained international experience, her work is strongly rooted in the Polish tradition which provides Ołowska with inspiration. FOTO
Teatr Opera Buffa
was founded in 1998 by Katarzyna Wińska. She founded the company after the successful production of Solo—Extra Reality Show, a play about madness, in which she had cast people receiving mental health services instead of professional actors. So far Opera Buffa has produced several dramatic works which focus on presenting reality through the eyes of patients with schizophrenia. On stage, the actors do not declaim, instead they play a kind of pantomime to their pre-recorded dialogues playing from speakers. The script often includes spontaneous comments from actors, their memories, arguments, dreams, which convey their direct experience of mental illness. More than ten radio programmes, TV and press documentaries have been dedicated to Opera Buffa. A documentary film, titled Komedianci, has been made about its actors. FOTO
Stephen i Timothy Quay
(b. 1947) live in London. They studied illustration in Philadelphia before going on to the Royal College of Art in London, where they started to make animated shorts in the 1970s. Influenced by a tradition of Eastern European animation, the Quays display a passion for detail, a breathtaking command of colour and texture, and an uncanny use of focus and camera movement that makes their films unique and instantly recognizable. Best known for their classic 1986 film Street Of Crocodiles, which filmmaker Terry Gilliam recently selected as one of the ten best animated films of all time, they are masters of miniaturization and on their tiny sets have created an unforgettable world, suggestive of a landscape of long-repressed childhood dreams. FOTO
Michael Portnoy
(b. 1971) is an American multimedia artist and Director of Behavior. Portnoy’s long-standing investigation of social exchange and the rules of communication and play, has been conducted through a series of 'abstract gambling' tables and related sculptures, and conversation games drawing on 17th Century universal or taxonomic languages. He has called his breed of absurdist, dictatorial interaction with participants 'Relational Stalinism'—'the fashionable promise that an artwork might offer a democratic magic, transforming inter-relational codes into something nicer, is abandoned in favour of a clarification of the artist’s imperious role as producer and performer …’ (Tirdad Zolghadr, Creamier: Contemporary Art in Culture: 10 Curators, 100 Contemporary Artists, 10 Sources, Phaidon Press, 2010). FOTO
Jim Shaw
(born in 1952) lives and works in Los Angeles. He is an abstract painter who focuses on dream imagery, pop life, and “odd-ball subject matter”. He first came to the art world's attention in the 1980s with a series called My Mirage, exploring the tacky inner thoughts of a teenager named Billy, who grows from childhood to psychosis to born-again Christianity. Billy exists amid a 1960s and 70s visual overload of pulp novels, comic books, records, and psychedelic posters. His preoccupation seems to be with that which is inferior and which some would call pornographic. From that time, he has produced myriads of works including drawings, sculptures, prints and photographs that combine Pop-Art, Neo-Expressionism, Realism and Surrealism. The artist’s Oism project, initiated in the late 1990s, explores his fictional religion through media including video installations (recalling both Busby Berkeley musicals and 1980s aerobics videos) and found paintings in the 'Oist style'. Shaw’s richly layered practice takes liberally from both art history (Art Brut, Vincent van Gogh, Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Max Ernst) and America’s vernacular of coffeemakers and zombie films. FOTO
Catherine Sullivan
(born in 1968) is an American artist based in Chicago. Her work engages a variety of media—theatre, film, video, photography, writing and sculpture. She has produced several performances and theatre works wherein the performers are often coping with written texts, stylistic economies, re-enactments of historic performances, gestural and choreographic regimes, and conceptual orthodoxies. The works address a broad spectrum of historical and cultural reference and often involve multiple collaborators such as composer Sean Griffin. Her work is often staged and shot on sets for unrelated productions and in settings that project social function beyond the mise en scène Sullivan builds within them. What emerges from the numerous layers of collaboration and reference is an anxious and unresolved political and social sensibility. FOTO
Joanne Tatham
Tom O’Sullivan
Joanne Tatham (born in 1971) and Tom O’Sullivan (born in 1967) have worked collaboratively since 1995 making enigmatic images, sculptural objects and installations. The objects regularly resemble esoteric props from an avant-garde play and are designed to inhabit a range of scenarios activating their surroundings and cajoling the viewer into participating in an absurd kind of theatre. Tatham and O’Sullivan regularly re-stage and rework imagery and objects from their practice in a variety of different formats. Think, Think Thingamajig; what do you represent? (2006), their new work for Art Now, is a live recreation of one in a series of drawings in which sculptural objects interact with top-hatted, be-suited figures. In the drawing, Think, Think Thingamajig, think (2005), the Think Thingamajig—a cube decorated with pink diamonds against a black background which first appeared as a ceramic sculpture in 2003—becomes a costume sported by a gentleman who sits slumped in thoughtful contemplation. By translating the scene into a piece of living sculpture in the gallery, Tatham and O’Sullivan enable image, object and event to coalesce. FOTO
Nothing Twice / Nic 2 razy
12 September–23 November 2014
Cricoteka, Centre for the Documentation of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor
curator: Joanna Zielińska
exhibition design : Robert Rumas Studio
design & video: Noviki
phone: +48 12 421 69 75
e-mail: cricoteka@cricoteka.pl
address: Nadwiślańska 2-4, Kraków
Project Nic dwa razy / Nothing Twice is co-financed by the European Union under the 2007–2013 Małopolska Regional Operational Programme
Cricoteka Cultural Institution of the Małopolskie Voivodeship
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