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Author: Dóra Hegyi - Zsuzsa László
Keywords: artist run space, collective practices, conceptual art, international network, performative practices, photography, political reflection, semi-public event
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“Shaking hands” action board.
Photo: László Beke (courtesy of Artpool Art Research Center)
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Tug of War Action.
Photo: György Galántai (courtesy of Artpool Art Research Center)
Date: 26 August 1972
Participants: Imre Bak, Peter Bartoš, László Beke, Miklós Erdély, Stano Filko, György Galántai, Péter Halász, Béla Hap, Ágnes Háy, Tamás Hencze, György Jovánovics, J. H. Kocman, Péter Legéndy, János Major, László Méhes, Gyula Pauer, Vladjimir Popović, Petr Štembera, Rudolf Sikora, Tamás Szentjóby, Anna Szeredi, Endre Tót, Péter Türk, Jiři Valoch
Organized by: László Beke (1944)
Location: Chapel Studio of György Galántai, Balatonboglár
During the two-day meeting an exhibition and various actions were organized by László Beke, who invited artists from Czechoslovakia and Hungary to create contacts with each other.
Documents:
Interview with László Beke (1998)
Interview with Gyula Pauer (1998)
György Galántai’s diary (1972)
Source: Törvénytelen avantgárd. Galántai György balatonboglári kápolnaműterme 1970–1973 [Illegal Avant-garde, the Balatonboglár Chapel Studio of György Galántai 1970–1973], eds. Júlia Klaniczay and Edit Sasvári (Artpool–Balassi, Budapest, 2003): 141-3.
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Author: Ivana Bago
Keywords: collective practices, conceptual art, outdoor event, painting, performative practices, photography, poetry, self-organized
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Exhibition-action, Sava river bathing resort, Zagreb, 1975, photo by: Fedor Vučemilović
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Exhibition-action, Republic Square, Zagreb, 1975 (work by Sven Stilinović), photo by Sven/Mladen Stilinović
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Exhibition-action, Republic Square, Belgrade, 1976 (work by Željko Jerman), photo by Fedor Vučemilović
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Exhibition-action, City walk, Zagreb, 1976, photo by Branka Jurjević
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Date: 1975-1979
Place: City of Zagreb (various outdoor and indoor locations); Mošćenička Draga beach; City of Belgrade, SKC Gallery, Belgrade
Concept by: Group of Six Artists
Participants: Boris Demur, Željko Jerman, Vlado Martek, Mladen Stilinović, Sven Stilinović, Fedor Vučemilović
In the period of 1975-1979 a group of artists and friends (later dubbed “Group of Six Artists”) — Boris Demur, Željko Jerman, Vlado Martek, Mladen Stilinović, Sven Stilinović, Fedor Vučemilović — organized a series of twenty-one “exhibition-actions.” With the exception of Demur, who graduated painting at the Zagreb Academy of Arts, the group members were not trained as visual artists, but rather approached the “new art practice” from other fields, such as poetry (Martek), photography (Sven Stilinović, Vučemilović), amateur photography (Jerman), amateur film (Mladen Stilinović). This determined their shared anti-aesthetic, anti-programmatic and anti-professional stance to art production, resulting in experiments with photography, poetry, text, concepts, ephemeral interventions and actions, as well as exhibition experiments. The initial distance from academic and art institutions led them to the concept of “exhibition-actions,” a series of self-organized public presentations of their work, initially taking place in the open, public spaces of the city and its surroundings: the streets and squares of the Zagreb city center, residential neighborhoods, the river banks, beaches, university hallways.
In his chronology of the group’s activities, Darko Šimičić traces the group’s self-organized presentations to the action performed on the night of the 9th of October 1974, when three group members (Demur, Jerman, Martek) intervened on the advertising board under the railway bridge of Savska Street in Zagreb. In this action, Jerman presented his famous slogan “This Is Not My World,” written in hypo on photographic paper. According to Šimičić, “[t]his illegal exhibition in a public site was to become in somewhat modified form the prototype [of] the later group appearances.” The first exhibition of the whole group took place on the 11th of May at the Sava River public bathing site: works were installed along the embankment, on sunbathing boards, and the grass. The term “exhibition-action” was first used to describe their second collaborative exhibition, which took place on the 29th of May, at the Zagreb neighborhood Sopot, part of the newly-urbanized zones of the “New Zagreb” built during the 1950s and 1960s. In their exhibition-actions, the artists exhibited paintings, photographs, installations, objects, as well as performed actions. For example, in the Sopot exhibition-action, Jerman showed two childhood photographs pasted on styrofoam boards: one in which he became member of the pioneer organization, and the other where he received his first Holy Communion. Mladen Stilinović showed paintings from the cycle Me, You, Mine, Yours, and performed an action of jumping up in order to appear higher than the skyscrapers in the background.
The group’s public presentations gained more visibility and attention with their October 1975 exhibition at the Republic Square, the central square in Zagreb. Jerman exhibited his “elementary photographs,” along with the slogan “Life, and not slogans”; Sven Stilinović showed a series of photos of a dead dog juxtaposed with photographs deemed to possess artistic beauty; Mladen Stilinović handed out photos of smiles to passers-by; Demur pasted the advertisement board with the poster on which only the word “Eto” [There you go] was written; Vučemilović asked the passer-by to take a photo of him. Judging from the reactions that the artists recorded and later published in one of the issues of their Maj 75 magazine, Zagreb citizens were not impressed, dubbing the exhibition “international idiocy” and seeing it as a symptom of disease, or simply students’ immaturity and idleness. Polemics in the newspapers ensued when a local art critic dismissed the artistic validity of the action.
An interesting twist to the form of exhibition-action was added with the May 1976 action City Walk, in which the artists walked through the streets of Zagreb, carrying their paintings, photographs and art objects. Demur carried a black painting with the text “I’m not crazy to paint bourgeois paintings” written in red. In June of the same year, they staged an exhibition-action on the beach of Moščenićka Draga. Jerman laid on photo-paper, leaving behind the imprint of his body; Martek performed an action of tearing banknotes: “In my opinion there is no greater contradiction than the contradiction between the sea as a reality and a the money as an abstraction.” Sven Stilinović painted beach stones, while Vučemilović, who was not present, declared the movements of Jerman to be his own art (live sculptures). Several works testify to the centrality of the dematerialized idea of art for the group’s work: art — as well as collective and collaborative work — was conceived as a process, and a form of immediate sharing that cannot be reproduced or materialized. For example, Demur made a series of “mental works,” works that were not realized and that were forgotten: “I left my mental process of action in its original form without translating it into communication of any kind whatsoever.” Similarly, Mladen Stilinović stated that part of the works conceived for the exhibition-action “was neither produced, noted down, now memorized. It was lived with friends.”
Starting from 1977, several exhibition-actions took place in gallery spaces. For the January 1978 exhibition at the Nova Gallery in Zagreb, the artists played with the idea of “oral tradition.” Keeping the tradition of their street presentations, the concept required a mandatory presence of the artists next to their work exhibited in the gallery, so that they could engage in conversations with the visitors and communicate their ideas about each particular work, as well as more general ideas on art. In June 1968, in the framework of the April Encounters festival in Belgrade, the group decided to organize a public working meeting at the SKC Gallery, making the very workings of the group and the plotting of their contributions to the festival transparent to the audience. This idea of openness, communication, and sharing was central to the group, and resonated with other artistic and curatorial practices that engaged in the conversations around the “democratization of the arts” that characterized the 1960s and 1970s. However, also crucial was the idea of self-organization and autonomy, and the freedom from institutional and ideological conditioning and censorship. Alongside the unique concept of “exhibitions-actions,” the group’s samizdat “catalogue-magazine” Maj 75, initiated in 1978, as well as their engagement in Podroom — the Working Community of Artists from 1978-1980, became additional platforms through which the group strove to achieve these aims.
Document: Comments of passers-by recorded during exhibition-actions at the Zagreb Republic Square (1975 and 1978)
Guide for the chronology (Ivana Bago: Something to think about: values and valeurs of visibility in Zagreb from 1961 to 1986)
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Author: Ewa Malgorzata Tatar
Keywords: gender issues, irony, photography
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Cover of the catalog (from the archive of Prof. Izabella Gustowska)
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Anna Bednarczuk’s pages in the catalog.
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Izabella Gustowska’s pages in the catalog.
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Collective collage from the catalog.
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Krystyna Piotrowska’s pages in the catalog.
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Press review, scan without details of publication from the archive of prof. Izabella Gustowska.
Date: 6–23 February 1978
Participants: Anna Bednarczuk, Izabella Gustowska, and Krystyna Piotrowska
Location: BWA Poznań “Arsenał”[1]
The first articles exploring the phenomenon of feminist art in Western Europe and the United States were published in Polish art magazines around 1980.[2] In those times the first minor exhibitions of feminist art appeared—exhibitions of the type “women choose women,” curated by artists who also took part in them. The first genuine feminist exhibition was “Three Women” with the participation of Poznań-based artists, in the city gallery of art. The title of the show was probably inspired by the title of Robert Altman’s movie of the same name. A catalog was also published with the biographical notes of the participants, reproductions of their most significant self-portraits shown (among others) in the gallery, and with the collage of their artworks and inspirations. During the opening, hostesses dressed in Playboy-bunny costumes served a cake in the form of a female breast, which gives the ironical frame to the art pieces that were very conscious of the category of masquerade and the cultural impact on sexed subjects, made with the usage of embroidery, lingerie, and other so-called female attributes. Self-portraits by Anna Bednarczuk made as reduced fabrics, Krystyna Piotrowska’s Better Face in Your Mirror?—a kind of drawing and graphic catalog of faces and their parts—and Izabella Gustowska’s photos and photomontages of female bodies and flowers were on display, among others.
After the show only one review was published in the local press and the exhibition passed without a bigger impact on Polish art. It only appeared recently in the catalog text of the “Three Women” (conscious reference) exhibition of Ewa Partum, Natalia LL, and Maria Pinińska-Bereś, curated by Ewa Toniak, that opened in 2011 in the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw.
[1] Biuro Wystaw Artystycznych [Office of Art Exhibitions] was the name of the city galleries in Poland in the ’80s.
[2] S. Morawski, “Neofeminizm w sztuce,” Sztuka 4 (1977): and B. Baworowska, “Wystawa sztuki feministycznej w Holandii,” Sztuka 3 (1980). After her residency in New York in 1977, Natalia LL appeared in 1978 with a cycle of gallery lectures on feminist-art phenomena.
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Author: Ewa Malgorzata Tatar
Keywords: artist-publication, gender issues, international network, mail art, photography
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Review of the exhibition, Barbara Baworowska, “Sztuka kobiet,” Sztuka 4/5 (1978): 69–70.
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Review of the exhibition, Barbara Baworowska, “Sztuka kobiet,” Sztuka 4/5 (1978): 69–70.
Date: April 1978
Participants: Suzy Lake (Canada), Noemi Maidan (Switzerland), Natalia LL (Poland), and Carolee Schneemann (USA)
Organizer: Natalia LL
Location: PSP Jatki Gallery, Wrocław
This was the second exhibition of what’s referred to as women’s art in Poland and the first international one where the practices of foreign participants were represented by mail-art pieces.[1] Natalia LL was the first Polish artist who contributed to international feminist-art exhibitions and publications since 1975, and her art was published among others’ work on the cover of the monographic feminist issue of Heute Kunst (issue 9, 1975) edited by Gislind Nabakovsky. LL also had the opportunity of a half-year stay in the United States, mostly in New York City, in 1977 (through a Kościuszko Foundation grant), and afterwards she gave a series of lectures on feminist art in Polish art galleries.[2] In the Wrocław show, LL exhibited her Categorical Statements from the Sphere of Post-Consumer Art (1975), Schneemann’s artist’s publication Cezanne, She was a Great Painter (1975), a photo by Suzy Lake showing a woman with her body bound by a rope—shown as an installation, with the rope in space separating the art from the audience—and Maidan’s collages on maternity covered by traditional nappies hanging on the walls.
[1] Review of the exhibition, B. Baworowska, “Sztuka kobiet,” Sztuka 4/5 (1978): 69–70.
[2] Natalia LL, “Feminist tendency,” in Natalia LL. Texts (Bielska BWA Gallery: Bielsko-Biała, 2004).
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Author: Daniel Grúň
Keywords: collective practices, educational event, ephemaral works, performance for photo camera, photography, processuality, semi-public event, site-specificity
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Peter Bartoš has come to the lake with ecological issues, 4 August 1978 / Peter Bartoš prišiel k jazeru s ekologickou problematikou (Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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Juraj Mihalík (Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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A — B (Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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Preparing to strike / Príprava k úderu (Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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Sculptural or achaeological precision / Sochárska alebo archeologická presnosť (Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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Juraj Mihalík, sculptor, holds a newspaper / Noviny drží Juraj Mihalík, sochár (Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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(Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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(Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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(Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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End of a conversation / Koniec rozhovoru (Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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A sculpture by Vladimír Havrilla / Socha Vladimíra Havrillu (Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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Vladimír Havrilla reveals his sculpture / Vladimír Havrilla zviditeľňuje svoju sochu (Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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Water as sculptural material and medium / Voda jako sochársky materiál a médium (Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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Ľubomír Ďurček: Self-portrait with potholer’s goggles / Ľubomír Ďurček, Autoportrét s potápačskými okuliarmi (Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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(Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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(Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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(Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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Archeologist Ladislav Snopko talks about taking a stone in one’s hand / Archeológ Ladislav Snopko hovorí o kameni do ruky (Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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Once more on the haptic / Ešte raz o haptike (Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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The third of all holds / Tretí, zo všetkých úchytov (Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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Only a small part of today’s texts / Iba malá časť dnešných textov (Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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One of the authors of the lake book / Jeden z autorov jazernej knihy (Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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(Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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(Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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Gerulata, part of a Roman fortress / Gerulata, časť rímskeho opevnenia (Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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(Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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Gerulata, underground / Gerulata, spod zeme (Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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(Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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(Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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(Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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Vladimír Havrilla distributes microten bags, 7 August 1978 / Vladimír Havrilla prideľuje mikrotenové vrecká (Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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Sculptor Juraj Mihalík makes his fountain operational / Sochár Juraj Mihalík predvádza svoju fontánu (Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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Somewhere apart, Stano Filko is sketching and writing on microten bags / Stano Filko niekde v ústraní kreslil a písal na mikroténové sáčky (Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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Afterwards he turned them over / Potom ich obrátil naruby (Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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Ladislav Snopko speaks about archaeology / Ladislav Snopko hovorí o archeológii (Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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The sculptor who creates sculptures can himself be a sculpture, says Ľubomír Ďurček / Sochár, ktorý vytvára sochy, môže byť sám sochou – hovorí Ľubomír Ďurček (Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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(Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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(Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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Juraj Mihalík thinking over another kind of sculpture / Juraj Mihalík uvažuje o inom druhu plastiky (Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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(Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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Sociology and sculpture before their action / Sociológia a sochárstvo pred svojou akciou (Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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(Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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(Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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(Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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(Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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Once again on the secrets of archaeology in the present / Ešte raz o tajomstvách archeológie v prítomnosti (Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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Ľubomír Ďurček looks at this world through a microten bag /Ľubomír Ďurček sa díva na tento svet cez mikrotenový sáčok (Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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One more look towards the sun / Ešte jeden pohľad smerom k slnku (Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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Painter Ľubomír Ďurček looks through a microten bag at himself / Maliar Ľubomír Ďurček sa díva cez mikroténový sáčok na seba (Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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Ďurček: Enclave / Ďurček – Enkláva (Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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(Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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(Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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Vladimír Havrilla concludes the lakeside meeting / Vladimír Havrilla ukončuje stretnutie při jazere (Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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Vladimír Havrilla fashioning water / Vladimír Havrilla modeluje vodu (Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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(Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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Invisibility within reach / Neviditeľnosť na dosah (Photo from the archive of Ľubomír Ďurček)
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Date: 4-7 August 1978
Participants and organizers: Peter Bartoš (b. 1938), Ľubomír Ďurček (b. 1948), Stano Filko (b. 1937), Vladimír Havrilla (b. 1943), Juraj Mihálik (b. ), Ladislav Snopko (b. 1949)
Location: Rusovce, Bratislava, Czechoslovakia
By a lake in Bratislava, participants created mini events and ephemeral artworks out of materials found at the location, including pebbles, stones, plastic, etc. The event was initiated by Ľubomír Ďurček, a conceptual artist, performer, filmmaker, and author of experimental texts and books. The entire event was documented in a series of black-and-white photographs taken by participants.
In comments made Ďurček about the event, he points said that situations created did not necessarily correspond to reality.
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Author: Ewa Malgorzata Tatar
Keywords: educational event, environment / installation, gender issues, performance, photography
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Photo of Anna Kutera’s lecture (courtesy of ON Gallery)
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Natalia’s LL: States of Concentration, performance (courtesy of ON Gallery)
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Opening with Krystyna Piotrowska in the front, and with Ewa Partum’s photomontage-cycles, Self-identification from 1980 on the wall (courtesy of ON Gallery)
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Opening with Ewa Partum’s Self identification cycles in the background (courtesy of ON Gallery)
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Opening with Krystyna Piotrowska in the photo. In the
background Natalia LL’s Pyramid, 1979 (courtesy of ON Gallery)
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Opening with the curators, Krystyna Piotrowska and Izabella Gustowska (courtesy of ON Gallery)
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Photo of Ewa Partum’s performance: Women, Marriage is against You! (courtesy of ON Gallery)
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Maria Pinińska-Bereś: The Well of Pink, 1977 (courtesy of ON Gallery)
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Maria Pinińska-Bereś: Banner, 1980 (courtesy of ON Gallery)
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Maria Pinińska-Bereś’ sculptures from the cycles Psycho Furniture, 1968 (courtesy of ON Gallery)
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Photo of Maria Pinińska-Bereś’s performance: The Washing I. (courtesy of ON Gallery)
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Photo of Maria Pinińska-Bereś’s performance: The Washing I. (courtesy of ON Gallery)
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Krystyna Piotrowska: Installation (courtesy of ON Gallery)
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Teresa Tyszkiewicz’ photos on the left, Krystyna Piotrowska’s drawings in the center (courtesy of ON Gallery)
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Anna Kutera: I’m decide [sic!] about my hairstyle, not fashion dictatores, from the cycles Situations stimulated – Hairstyles , 1978 (courtesy of ON Gallery)
Date: November 1980
Participants: Izabella Gustowska, Anna Kutera, Natalia LL, Ewa Partum, Krystyna Piotrowska, Maria Pinińska-Bereś, and Teresa Tyszkiewicz
Organizers: Izabella Gustowska and Krystyna Piotrowska
Location: ON Gallery, Poznań
The first national exhibition of the practices of Polish women artists interested in negotiations of feminine subjectivity was organized by two artists who run the gallery associated with the Fine Arts Academy. Izabella Gustowska, when asked about the concept of the show, said she had been familiar with most of the artists from previous exhibitions at ON except for Ewa Partum, whom they invited due to her clear-cut artistic position, and Maria Pinińska-Bereś, whom, in turn, they wanted to honor as a pioneer of a certain kind of sensitivity. This was why the “L”-shaped gallery’s smaller room was devoted entirely to Pinińska-Bereś. The pink-quilted fluid rug spilling out of her Well of Pink ran across the floor of the larger room above, where the works of the younger artists were on display together with photographic works, films, and works on paper. The invited artists presented performances or live lectures (except for Krystyna Piotrowska, Teresa Tysziewicz probably made a comment to her movies) during the two-day symposium opened by speeches of the theorists Alicja Kępińska and Jerzy Ludwiński. What the different realizations had in common was, in my view, their focus on the issue of space and the representations of the subjectively understood feminine body.
“Although the exhibition had not been thought as a feminist demonstration, the title provoked questions about distinguishing the characteristic of art created by women artists—their peculiar features and goals. The organizers wanted to provoke such a discussion and posed questions that had never been asked in Poland before. […] I do not say that nothing like women’s art does exist, because art has no sex (is sexless),” wrote Grzegorz Dziamski. “But look at what women artists do and wonder if in the pieces presented by them there is something you will not find anywhere else—another sensibility, other imaginations, a different approach to the world.”[1]
Beside the Polish Film Chronicle that reported on Partum’s performance, the exhibition was not reviewed in the media and stayed forgotten for a long time, mentioned only in Dziamski’s articles on women’s art and in the catalogs of Presence III and ON Gallery. The thematic was continued by Gustowska in the “Presence” exhibition cycle in the 1980s and 1990s.
Detailed description of the exhibition
Document: Izabella Gustowska: WHY? (1998)
[1] Grzegorz Dziamski, “Drobne narracje,” in Drobne narracje. XV lat galerii ON (Poznań, 1994), 6–7.
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Author: Dovile Tumpytė
Keywords: avant-garde, photography
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View of the exhibition. Photo: Algirdas Šeškus (courtesy of Algirdas Šeškus).
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View of the exhibition. Photo: Algirdas Šeškus (courtesy of Algirdas Šeškus).
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View of the exhibition. Photo: Algirdas Šeškus (courtesy of Algirdas Šeškus).
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View of the exhibition. Photo: Algirdas Šeškus (courtesy of Algirdas Šeškus).
Date: January 24–February 14, 1985
Participants: Algirdas Šeškus (1945) and Alfonsas Budvytis (1949)
Organizer: LSSR (Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic) Art Workers’ Palace, Vilnius
Location: LSSR Art Workers’ Palace, Vilnius
This series of photographs, created in 1984, was an interpretation of a state commission. Algirdas Šeškus and Alfonsas Budvytis, at the time outsiders of the official art-photography scene, authored the project. “Ignoring the standards of the portrayal of public figures and experimenting with the models’ characters and psychological types and the composition of the shots, these artists have expanded the space of the traditional aesthetics of Lithuanian photography,” noted art historian and curator Margarita Matulytė.[1] The collection of sixty works was first presented at the Yermolova Theater in Moscow in 1984, accompanying the State Russian Drama Theater’s official tour, and then traveled back to be exhibited in Vilnius: it was exhibited in the theater as well as presented at the LSSR Art Workers’ Palace in 1985. The press did not take notice the project at the time, and its innovative character and the artists’ avant-garde attitude have only recently been highlighted.
[1] Margarita Matulytė, Annotation for the exhibition “Portraits of the Actors, Directors, Composers, and Set Designers of the State Russian Drama Theater”, National Gallery of Art, Vilnius, 20 April – 27 June, 2010.
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Author: "pARTisan"/ Olga Kopenkina
Keywords: art education, avant-garde, collaboration, performative practices, photography
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Exhibition “Beginning”. Dom Kino (House of Cinema), 1989, Minsk. Photograph from series “Red Square” by Vladimir Shaklevich. Courtesy: Vladimir Shaklevich
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Exhibition “Beginning”. Dom Kino (House of Cinema), Minsk, 1989. Photograph from series “Neformali” by Galina Moskalyova. Courtesy: Galina Moskalyova
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Exhibition “Beginning”. Dom Kino (House of Cinema), Minsk, 1989. Sergey Kozhemyakin, “Glasnost”, photograph. 1987. Courtesy: Sergey Kozhemyakin
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Exhibition “Beginning”. Dom Kino (House of Cinema), Minsk, 1989.
“Transformation of an Image” by Sergey Kozhemyakin. 1988. Courtesy: Sergey Kozhemyakin
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Exhibition “Beginning”. Dom Kino (House of Cinema), Minsk, 1989. Photograph from series “Persona non grata” by Uladzimir Parfianok. 1988/93. Courtesy: Uladzimir Parfianok.
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Exhibition “Beginning”. Dom Kino (House of Cinema), Minsk, 1989. Photography from series “Persona non grata” by Uladzimir Parfianok. 1988/93. Courtesy: Uladzimir Parfianok.
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Exhibition “Beginning”. Dom Kino (House of Cinema), 1989, Minsk. Photograph from series “Red Square” by Vladimir Shaklevich. Courtesy: Vladimir Shaklevich
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Exhibition “Beginning”. Dom Kino (House of Cinema), 1989, Minsk. Photograph from series “Elections” by Galina Moskalyova. Courtersy: Galina Moskalyova.
Date: 1989
Participants: Galina Moskaleva, Vladimir Shakhlevich, Uladzimir Parfianok, Sergey Kozhemyakin and others.
Location: House of Cinema (Dom Kino), Minsk
Their photographic works demonstrated an approach to photography as a form of contemporary visual art that inherited the experimental and innovative traditions of avant-garde art.
“Beginning” was one of the most significant Belarusian photography exhibitions in the ‘80s. The show presented work by Valery Lobko’s students. Lobko was a prominent teacher of experimental photography, and ran workshops on creative photography between 1981–86.
Concurrently, informal, creative associations of self-taught photographers such as Pravintsyia, Meta, Bielaruski Klimat, and Panorama started exhibiting between 1987–91.
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