calendario eventi  :: 

X

6/3/2015

Katarzyna Krakowiak

Clark House Initiative, Bombay

Dust, forms layers of archaeological interest when it collects within grime and paint over furniture, damp corners of walls, statues and other agents that bring to rest particles of our skin, eroding soil and stone, hair and general minute detritus. Finer particles interlace with hair and other available fibres such as spider webs to create shapes that are furry, light and airborne. Animal associations are often made with these shapes, the Poles prefer to call them cats, the French prefer to associate it with wool and call the collected balls of dust ‘sheep', and in English they are called 'dust bunnies'.

In the lanes that descend into tunnels of metal worker shops from Falkland Road there is a certain change in the quality of soil, years of oils, acids, ferrous particles, brass ingots have been paved into the surface, burnt coal and sand gather on the walls and the skin of the workers, at times the road-dust that collects is painted over creating sculptural textures, that are coarse when viewed smooth when touched, much like the anomaly of a 'Dust Bunny' - something that sounds endearing but has a revolting constitution. Katarzyna Krakowiak collects dust produced by the people of Bombay and has gathered in its architecture for her project at Clark House Initiative.

"Their Eternal Pity no taller than the pimp on Falkland Road
No pavilion put up in the sky for us.
Lords of wealth, they are, locking up lights in those vaults of theirs.
In this life, carried by a whore,
not even the sidewalks are ours"

- Namdeo Dhasal, ‘Tyanchi Sanatan Daya’ (from Golpitha, 1975, tr. Eleanor Zelliot/Jayant Karve)

Dhasal described his frustration with the Bombay's disaffection for his people - Mahars , Untouchables, Muslims, Prostitutes, Blacksmiths and Sanitation Workers, those who lived on Falkland Road - as his 'African Anguish'. The anguish was against the burden of tradition , the slavery it put upon the likes of him. Dhasal held affinities with the 'Dub-Poets' from the Black Panther movement in New York, proposing his anguish of culture under the cudgels of tradition, wealth and an unforgiving caste system. He mocked the sympathy of the wealthy and their acts of kindness for the outcastes like him, reminding them of their unkind sympathy that creates ghettos of a reality - a detritus of humans that collect not far from Bombay's city centre to service its tradition based society with sex and labour. Among them are the blacksmiths.

Kamathipura, Bombay's red-light district has its main thoroughfare in Falkland Road, the city has begun to encroach into the quarter by its most efficient machinery of gentrification - real estate redevelopment. The undesired elements in a housing society apart from prostitutes are blacksmiths. Aziz Ur Rehman Ansari and his son Hafiz Ur Rehman have run a casting unit on the side of chawl for decades. But now a city builder wants them to change professions as within a respectable society blacksmiths are aliens. Katarzyna Krakowiak had walked the streets of Falkland Road visiting the cavernous lanes that housed metal fabricating plants and casting units, smoked ash from coal, acids and oil had turned the soil below into a dark luminous black. She wanted to collect the dust bunnies to create a sculpture. At the foundry of Aziz Ur Rehman we found chunks of Brass refuse, the impurities that gather together when brass is smelted, this she decided to cast in bronze after a conversation with Rehman who said it was the closest resemblance he could give to the dust bunnies. His son said his father entertained our request as it paid well and brought them out of the mundane routine that they followed fabricating souvenirs for tourists who visit the city centre. Katarzyna brought about some attention from the busy happenings on the street but she felt most safe in this locale, which was once one of the most multicultural parts of the city housing women and men from across many ports and those who refused a measure of purity in a stratified society.

- Sumesh Sharma Bombay 2015

Katarzyna Krakowiak (1980) lives and works in Gdańsk, Poland.
Katarzyna Krakowiak creates sculptures, objects and sound installations.
Her works are usually intangible and take the form of acoustic environments
in which the viewer/listener is welcome to submerge.
Katarzyna Krakowiak is a sculptor, who uses various media, especially sound, to explore the limits of architecture; she creates large-scale installations involving existing city buildings or structures. Following her project titled “Making the walls quake as if they were dilating with the secret knowledge of great powers”, Krakowiak received special mention at the 2012 edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale; the project was curated by Michal Libera. Krakowiak is the author of the “Radio all.FM” project she carried out in several cities all over the world (e.g. Tel Awiv, Tallinn, Mexico City, Wroclaw), in which she used a radio transmitter to “borrow” frequencies from various radio stations and then to broadcast through a hidden transmitter to completely unaware recipients she would walk past. Krakowiak’s works were presented at numerous solo exhibitions, including one at the Foksal Gallery in Warsaw (a Museums at Night 2011 event; the installation was titled “Who owns air?”) and one at Bunkier Sztuki in Kraków. In 2012, one of her projects was included in a group exhibition titled “Possibility 02: Growth, Shorthand” presented in New York and complemented by the publication of the “Shorthand” artbook discussing the physicality of sound.

This exhibition is supported by the Polish Institute New Delhi.
The artist and Clark House especially thank the director Anna Tryc-Bromley, and visual arts programmer Aneta Swiecicka.

Clark House Initiative - A curatorial collaborative and a union of artists concerned with ideas of freedom.
On-going program: 'Mashup', retrospective of Judy Blum Reddy.
The current artistic directors of Clark House initiative are Yogesh Barve, Poonam Jain, Prabhakar Pachpute and Amol Patil.

Preview: 7 March 2015, 5.30pm

Clark House Bombay
ground floor, 8 Nathalal Parekh Marg, Colaba, Bombay 400039.
Opposite Sahakari Bhandar and Regal Cinema, next to Woodside Inn
Open daily including Sundays 11am - 7pm, closed on Mondays.

stampa

permanent link