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11/12/2009

Two exhibitions

Modern Art Oxford, Oxford

Pawel Althamer: Common Task

Exhibition part of POLSKA! YEAR

Common Task is an ambitious new work by Pawel Althamer that takes the form of a science-fiction film in real-time. Accompanied by members of his local community in Bródno the artist has embarked on an ongoing journey from Warsaw to Brazil, Belgium and Africa. The journey continues to Modern Art Oxford where Althamer is transforming the first floor galleries into a zone for teleportation. Visitors will be invited to take part in the journey that is the Common Task.

Pawel Althamer was born in Warsaw in 1967. A graduate from the Department of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Althamer gained attention in the 1990s as part of a rising generation of Polish artists. His work, encompassing sculpture, performance, film and public actions, often takes the form of orchestrated events involving communities of people. Participation and the exploration of altered or parallel dimensions of experience have proved central to his art.

In February 2000, he organised a live action event in a residential tower block in Bródno in Warsaw where he lives with his family. In 2007 in London he presented Real Time Movie, shot as a live event in London’s Borough Market with the actor Jude Law, as part of the Tate Modern exhibition The World As A Stage. For Skulptur Projekte Münster, 2007, he worked with a group of people to dig out a path across grassy parkland into the agricultural fields beyond the city’s limits. Over the past ten years the artist has been running a ceramics class for disabled people at a studio in Warsaw’s Nowolipie Street, travelling with his students to present their work in museums and galleries across Europe. In 2004, Althamer received the prestigious Vincent Van Gogh Award.

This is Pawel Althamer’s first solo exhibition in the UK.

Related Events
As part of Common Task, Pawel Althamer’s former teacher Professor Grzegorz Kowalski from the Warsaw Academy of Art has been invited by The Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art to lead a series of workshops and tutorial sessions with students. Kowalski's revolutionary teaching methods have been influential on many of the current generation of Polish artists. To inaugurate his visit to the Ruskin in February, Modern Art Oxford will host a public talk by Professor Kowalski in which he will talk about his work as an artist and teacher.

Pawel Althamer: Common Task, Brasilia, 2009.

Further information about Common Task can be found at
http://www.openartprojects.org/Projects/view/1511/en_gb/Common-Task

Supported by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, Warsaw, as part of POLSKA! YEAR, The Henry Moore Foundation, LOT Polish Airlines and Open Art Projects.

Showing concurrently with Pawel Althamer’s exhibition will be Miroslaw Balka: Topography 12 December 2009 to 7 March 2010.

PAWEL ALTHAMER
Pawel Althamer was born in 1967. He currently lives in Warsaw.
Selected solo exhibitions include: Pawel Althamer and Others, Vienna Secession, Austria (2009), One Of Many - Fondazione Nicola Trussardi Mediolan (2007), Au Centre Pompidou, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2006), Pawel And Vincent, Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, Netherlands (2004), So Genannte Wellen und Andere Phaenomene des Geistes, Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany (2003), Unsichtbar, Alexanderplatz, Berlin and Prisoners, Westfälischen Kunstverein, Münster, Germany (2002).

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Miroslaw Balka: Topography

Exhibition part of POLSKA! YEAR

‘My work is always at the frontier of things. One finds in it the traces of a political and religious situation that I try to describe, the covering up of the truth, the hiding of what you believe in, the pretence.’ Miroslaw Balka in conversation with Juan Vicente Aliaga.

Over the past ten years the acclaimed sculptor Miroslaw Balka has been making concise and moving video works. Topography introduces this compelling and little known work as a multi-dimensional installation in Modern Art Oxford’s galleries and offers fresh insight into the artist's practice.

Balka uses his video recordings as a repository of visual and thematic material, extending a sculptural language that is rich in associations with history and his native Poland. The body and its limitations, memory, and the space between looking and knowing are recurring themes. In his videos, he assumes the role of traveller and of witness. If the historical trauma of The Holocaust figures largely in this body of work, its presence is only barely suggested. The large-scale projection of a snowy landscape in Pond (2003), mesmerising in its natural beauty and its stillness, was shot at the site of the concentration camp Auschwitz Birkenau. Its pendant Bambi (2003) in which young deer look for food in the snow amidst the barbed and metallic vestiges of the camp’s prison compound, is poignant in its reflection of the discordant layers of history and how we remember them. In more recent works, such as Flagellare A, B and C (all 2009), Balka offers a more physical expression of the human condition, capturing his repeated, violent gestures of beating the floor in a form of primitive enactment.

Writing on Balka’s video works, curator Julian Heynen has observed: ‘Balka comes upon the surprising and the banal, the poetic and the insufferable. And it is precisely those things that appear simply too huge, too complex, too terrible to be explained by ordinary words and images.’

Showing concurrently with the Miroslaw Balka: Topography exhibition will be Pawel Althamer: Common Task 12 December 2009 to 7 March 2010.

Organised by Modern Art Oxford, Miroslaw Balka: Topography is curated by Suzanne Cotter.

Supported by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, Warsaw, as part of POLSKA! YEAR and The Henry Moore Foundation.

The exhibition at Modern Art Oxford coincides with Balka’s commission for The Unilever Series in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern (13 October 2009 to 5 April 2010).

MIROSLAW BALKA
Born in 1958, Miroslaw Balka lives and works in Warsaw and Otwock. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw from 1980 to 1985. Solo exhibitions include Gravity, University Gallery, University of Massachusetts Amherst, MA, USA (2009), Entering Paradise, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh (2008), AAA+rauchsignale, Museum of Contemporary Art, Rijeka, Croatia (2007), Tristes tropiques, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland (2007), Bon voyage, Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg, France (2004) and tiedtothetoe, Dundee Contemporary Arts (2002). Balka participated in the 1990,1993, 2000 and 2005 Venice Biennales.

Miroslaw Balka has been invited to participate in the Oxford Union debate "This house believes that conceptual art just isn't art" on Thursday 5 November. Other invited speakers include David Armitage, Charles Thomson, Dr Stephen Deuchar, Adrian Searle and Matthew Collings.


POLSKA! YEAR comprises over 200 projects presenting the most interesting achievements of Polish culture to the UK audience. POLSKA! YEAR is a joint initiative by the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The cultural programme is coordinated by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, which is responsible for the promotion of Polish culture abroad. To find out more visit http://www.PolskaYear.pl

Image: Paweł Althamer, Common Task, Brussels 2009. Photo by Krysztof Kozanowski

For further information and images please contact:
Sara Dewsbery, Press and Marketing Officer on 01865 813813, sara.dewsbery@modernartoxford.org.uk

Modern Art Oxford
30 Pembroke Street, Oxford OX1 1BP
Opening times: Tuesday to Saturday 10am-5pm, Late night Thursdays open until 8pm, Sunday 12pm-5pm, Closed Mondays.
Free admission.

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