ArtBoom Tauron Festival

Introducing Art onto the Streets
The Visual Arts Festival, which began its activities in 2009, was conceived from the need to appreciate spectacular activities linked to contemporary art and set them in an urban space. The organisers have taken up the task of “extending the city” and enabling viewers to have contact with the latest art, created and developed in the present moment. The festival therefore shows Kraków to be a place of lively artistic dialogue, where art is not only created in the hidden corners of ateliers but also before our eyes.

Discourse
The first edition of ArtBoom was devoted to Kraków itself, but the second (11-27 June) seeks to analyse connections along an artist – work – viewer feedback loop. The festival, included in the City’s 6 senses project, seeks to pose questions about the possibility of communicating in the public sphere and whether it is indeed true – as Paweł Althamer claims – that “art is the most perfect method of communication that we have ever discovered”. Małgorzata Gołębiewska, artistic director of ArtBoom Tauron Festival, underlines that it is not about artists existing in public space just for the sake of it and not about the simple transplanting of their works onto the streets – this would not suffice; it’s about what art has to say or show, what reactions it sparks off, whether it will enter into a dialogue with the surroundings in which it finds itself, and with the viewer who – maybe quite by chance – has encountered it. It was with this aim in mind that the artists who have been invited to participate in the second edition of the festival were selected.

Individuality
10 names and one group (Raumlaborberlin): this is the main thrust of the ArtBoom Tauron Festival. It is also an encounter between the latest manifestations of Polish art and the global art scene. Representing the first are: Cezary Bodzianowski, Grzegorz Drozd, Maciej Kurak, Janek Simon and Robert Kuśmirowski; and the second: Gustav Metzger, Guy Ben-Ner, Kerim Seiler, Kobas Laksa and Sergey Shabohin. The artists want to enter into the tradition and culture of Kraków while retaining their own individuality. Cezary Bodzianowski will be attacking – in a literal sense! – Kraków’s Contemporary Art Gallery; Kobas Laksa will be refreshing the significance of one of the best known symbols of Kraków – Lajkonik; Grzegorz Drozd will cause letters from heaven to fall down on the centre of Kraków; Axel Timm and Francesco Apuzzo, members of Raumlaborberlin, have researched into the transformations in Kraków’s urban grid, in which the original structures combine with the process of revitalising the devastated suburbs as well as the new invasion, not always accepted by those that inhabit the architecture…

Youth / Freshness
This year’s edition of the festival has expanded to encompass the presentation of the youngest generation – apart from world class artists, novice artists selected from those who entered the Fresh Zone competition will have the chance to gain recognition. From among several dozen propositions, the most interesting nine works were selected, works by: Agnieszka Popek-Banach and Kamil Banach, Agata Dutkowska, the Łuhuu! Group, the Might Group, Michał Hyjek, Rozalia Kostka, Magdalena Lazar, Paulina Pankiewicz and Ewelina Woźniak-Szpakiewicz. Each of the artists has looked into the relationship between the project and its surroundings, while at the same time emphasising its individual character.

In the film section – also a debut feature at ArtBoom Tauron Festival – Barbara London (curator of new media at the New York Museum of Modern Art) will be presenting works by Nam June Paik – known as the father of video art – and Joan Jonas, one of the most important female figures in video art at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s; we’ll also be able to see the feature-length film Drawing Restraint 9 by famous American Matthew Barney.
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Due to the festival the biggest large format art gallery in Europe is to be created, placing Kraków in the centre of the contemporary art world and, as is claimed by Magdalena Sroka – director of the Krakow Festival Office – in this way “we are introducing art onto the streets”. (Barbara Fijał, monthly "Karnet")

11-27 June
Organisers: Krakow Festival Office, the East of Art Foundation
www.artboomfestival.pl

PROJECTS:

Cezary Bodzianowski – Bunker
Performance. Bodzianowski, dressed in golf gear, will be trying to overcome the obstacle in his path – with one difference – rather than a golf bunker it will be Kraków’s Bunkier Sztuki (Contemporary Art Gallery).

Grzegorz Drozd – Letters to a Brother
Over the centre of Kraków will be appearing three aeroplanes, from which thousands of spinning leaflets will be scattered, letters written especially for us by… male and female prisoners.

Gustav Metzger – Project Stockholm, June (Phase 1), project 1972, realisation 2008
Filmed document. The fumes of 120 cars are collected in a specially created architectural space in which the same cars will later be placed. This is followed by the process of auto-destruction by self-immolation.

Guy Ben-Ner – Drop The Monkey
Film. Eight-minute-long record of the telephone conversation that the director conducted with himself while travelling for a year between Berlin and Tel Aviv. 

Janek Simon – Bzik Tropikalny
Multimedia show. The project is intended as a reflection on the relationship of the West with what is seen beyond it through a prism created by the works of Witkacy. It is realised through the adoption of the mechanical and multimedia form of a spectacle unfolding in real time.

Kerim Seiler – Hypnos (Situationist Space Program)
Seiler is building a construction full of paradoxes and tensions between codes garnered from advanced technologies, historical allusions and basic architectural values, as well as a objective element.

Kobas Laksa – LikeKonik - Cracow Fetish Tour 2010
An attempt to reinterpret the significance of one of Kraków’s most well-known symbolic figures, who currently mainly serves tourists as an element of colourful local folklore. Laksa began studying the history of this figure and his provenance, detecting in them bawdy and even menacing associations.

Maciej Kurak – Adin, dwa, tri
Manipulation using the image of a gallery: the transplanting of the complete baggage of meanings connected with a concrete place to another specially created gallery space, in other words the positioning of Poznań’s Niewielka Gallery in the centre of Kraków.

Raumlaborberlin – LEM Monument
Axel Timm and Francesco Apuzzo together with a group of their students undertook a field survey in Kraków in an attempt to familiarise themselves with inhabitants’ problems and complete a deconstruction of the architectural developments accumulating over centuries of the city’s functioning as an urban structure.

Robert Kuśmirowski – Robert Kuśmirowski Project
The artist is known as a “genius of pretence”, “marvellous imitator” and “counterfeiter and manipulator of reality”. The majority of his works are based on the creation of imitations of objects, documents, photographs or situations that are deceptively close to the originals. This time, he’s also sure to surprise us.

Sergey Shabohin – Store
In the centre of Kraków, in places of historical significance, glass cabinets will be installed – boxes filled with the most varied objects, texts and images alluding to facts and events connected with a concrete place.