Monday, June 13, 2011

FW: Passion of an Ornithologist. On Myth Making at BWA SOKOL Gallery of Contemporary Art

June 12, 2011

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BWA SOKOL Galleryof Contemporary Art
<http://www.bwasokol.pl>


Passion of an Ornithologist.
On Myth Making
27 May­26 June 2011

Opening:
26 May 2011, 7:00pm

BWA SOKOL Gallery of Contemporary Art
34 Kosciuszki St.
33-300 Nowy Sacz, Poland

www.bwasokol.pl <http://www.bwasokol.pl>
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Artists: Nevin Aladag, Josef Dabernig, Andreas Fogarasi, Assaf Gruber,
Vlatka
Horvat, Franz Kapfer, Aleksander Komarov, Svätopluk Mykita, Paulina Olowska,
Agnieszka Polska, Maria Ritter, Slavs and Tatars, Bruno Schulz, Sofie
Thorsen

Curator: Adam Budak

Exhibition Architecture: Piotr Nawara / nsmoonstudio

"At that time we noticed for the first time father's passionate interest in
animals. To begin with, it was the passion of the huntsman and the artist
rolled into one. It was almost perhaps a deeper, biological sympathy of one
creature for kindred, yet different forms of life, a kind of experimenting
in
the unexplored regions of existence. Only at a later stage did matters take
that uncanny, complicated, essentially sinful and unnatural turn, which it
is
better not to bring into the light of day. But it all began with the
hatching
out of birds' eggs."
&lsqauo;Bruno Schulz, "The Birds"

For Roland Barthes, "the world enters language as a dialectical relation
between activities, between human actions; it comes out of myth as a
harmonious display of essences". An introductory chapter of an exhibition
narrative GALICIA. TOPOGRAPHIES OF MYTH, orchestrated by five curatorial
voices, the exhibition PASSION OF AN ORNITHOLOGIST. ON MYTH MAKING outlines
the primordial matrix of identity's production where myth is understood as a
"form of speech," a semiological schema, a meta-language, allowing to
negotiate the borderlines of reality, a history, and a fiction in the
uncanny
journey through the lands of fantasy, ultimate desire and phantasmagoria.
Here, the process of myth making, perceived as a generator of unity, order
and
an essence, is applied to the socio-political, geographic and cultural
condition of Galicia - former Habsburg Monarchy's invented land, an
"unrealized" project whose spatial imaginary through centuries oscillated
between Polish-Ukrainian borderlines, in the "shadow of the empire." For
Luiza
Bialasiewicz, "Galicia was born of myth, and from myth it would rise again".
The exhibition focuses on the mythical construction of Galicia, its "being
beyond history" and a status of a lost, "private homeland". As a particular
mental mapping, it too revisits Galicia's discourse of nostalgy, leading
towards the critical reconsideration of this multicultural and ethnically
diverse region's unstable geography as well as its troubled sense of
belonging
and universal standards.

The symbolic rites of entering, beginning and birth shape this exhibition's
dramaturgy, to a large extent inspired by the literary work of Polish Jewish
writer and artist, Bruno Schulz (1892­1942), and especially by his literary
debut, a short story "The Birds" (1934), which contains all essential
aspects
of Schulzian mythologized universum, including the childhood's memories of
innocence and subversion, dreams of immaturity and a drama of failed
authority, loss and abandonment. Schulz's central figure&lsqauo;the Father&lsqauo;is a
polymorphous and eccentric identity: a hybrid of traditions, cultures and
mythologies, a mystical medium, able to communicate with birds, his ultimate
obsession, whose language is a common motif in Judaic mythology, being in
fact
the language of myth and immaturity. The mythic and the real, the everyday
and
the metaphysical weave the fabric of Schulz's oneiric world and its
chronotope, perceived as a metaphor for all lost grand narratives, and
symbolizing the Galician topoi of the "last Europe".

While the exhibition willingly chooses to penetrate the Father's mysterious
attic&lsqauo;an ornithologist's laboratory cum a veritable "Noah's Ark"&lsqauo;where the
birds' eggs are collected and the metamorphosis is taking place, the artists
gathered in this exhibition are actively engaged in investigating the
mechanisms of myth making and initiation, referring to Galicia's living
tradition and revealing what constitutes its postcolonial condition:
heterogeneity and fragmentation, incompleteness and liminal status,
self-estrangement and familiarity. PASSION OF AN ORNITHOLOGIST. ON MYTH
MAKING
is an act of balancing a turbulent history: between a liberation and
entrapment, it articulates a historical subject, engaged in rehearsing its
lost ability for a linear storytelling.

during the opening:
20:00 FRACTAL DUO (Michal Gorczyca, Edward Deskur)
21:00 STREET OF CROCODILES (1986, dir. Quay Brothers, Great Britain)
in the courtyard of BWA SOKOL Gallery of Contemporary Art


<http://www.bwasokol.pl>


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1 comment:

  1. Hey guys if your eyes are awiting some new, nice, charming and beautiful contemporary art, then you can find it here so lets go and grab your favourite painting.

    ReplyDelete

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