Fakt Abstrakcja by Malgorzata
Sidor and Wienczyslaw Sporecki
Opening Reception: Friday 16 November,
6-8pm
Artists’ Talk: Presentation on fabs by
Piotr Szymor - Saturday 17 November, 3 - 5pm
Open Hours: 11am - 5pm, Friday -
Sunday, 17 November - 2 December 2018
Curated by William Seeto
Fakt Abstrakcja is an exhibition by Malgorzata Sidor, Wienczyslaw Sporecki and Wienczyslaw Sporecki
and Malgorzata Sidor initiated and organised fabs art projects
in Poland, U.K., Wales, India and Ukraine. Malgorzata
Sidor
Associations
of artists in Poland are prevalent, even after the fall of Communism, with each
city having one or more groups. They provide support for artists and are
loosely based on workers’ unions. They can be likened to artist-run-spaces in
the U.S., which are membership-based that provide studios and venues for
performances, events and exhibitions.
The
artworks in the exhibition are informed by Western contemporary art, however
they are moderated by connections to the past, as a recurring concept is
freedom and self-expression. The exhibition provides a unique viewpoint for the
Australian audience on contemporary art in Poland.
fabs
(fact-abstraction) - the idea of the site of activity.
A group of artists (an
association) who employ various forms, from performance and installation to
ephemeral action, going beyond the classifications of art, which constitute
fabs - a site of action, work and exhibition.
Fact is something that is known to
exist - a thing in itself, abstraction in not identical with the thing in
itself. That which happens between fact and abstraction, or between the
physical and the abstract, is a field in which we work. We acknowledge that in
the most precisely defined axiomatic systems there may appear some true
statements that are impossible to prove.
https://factabstraction. blogspot.com/
https://factabstraction.
******
Malgorzata Sidor
Born in 1960. Lives
and works in Lodz and Zbludza, Poland. Initiator, co-founder and President of the Artists’ Association fabs.
Artist –
Installation and photography. As an artist, she uses installation, photography,
sculpture forms and performance. She studied at the
University of Lodz, Poland, and Goldsmiths' College, University of London; and received a
scholarship from Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany in 1998. From 2005 to 2010 she ran the fabs gallery, Brzeska 7, in Warsaw, Poland;
in 2010, she set-up and directed the Association fabs’ Centre and Gallery in
Zbludza, Poland. She also initiated
a project to build the Piotr Kwit Museum at Zalesie, as well as a number of
other projects that supported the local community of the Commune of Kamienica,
Poland.
She initiated and organised international arts
meetings: Siteations, Cardiff, UK,
1994; Nothing New Under the Sun,
Glamorgan Heritage Coast, Southdown, U.K., 1996; Golden Seed, Mt Abu, India, 1997; Honey Forest, Bialowieza Primeval Forest, Poland, 1998; Antesound, CSW Inner Spaces, Poznan,
Poland, 2000; Atopos, former
Poznanski Factory, Lodz, Poland, 2001; Terrestrials, The Old Norblin Factory, Warsaw Poland, 2002; No Volume, Palac Sztuki, Lviv, Ukraine 2003; Phantoms 1, Borne Sulinowo, Poland, 2005;
Phantoms 2, Koneser Factory, Warsaw, Poland.
“I associate freedom with
the road, with movement, so with a journey. A real journey with no return. So I
thought: when we are very close to/with someone, we can move away a little, but
we still remain attached. And, on the whole, we don’t question our intimacy,
but, on the contrary, enrich and intensify that attachment. Thus there is some
leeway within certainty. This is what I tried to show in the photographic
series AQUARIUM 1. I would call it
freedom; freedom towards truth. Because it is freedom that leads us to truth.
And truths are most often something very simple; only one must know how to
notice them. We need to remember that truths almost always are revelations, and
that’s what makes them beautiful. This is what I tried to show in AQUARIUM 2. Why Aquarium? I probably
thought of two things. For the first time I personally felt the passage of
time; I felt that I lived in a time aquarium, and I wanted to realise it more
deeply, and on the other hand I thought of Suvorov’s Aquarium, and of an
antidote to that evil aquarium of his.
Aquarium is a partly autobiographical
description by Viktor Suvorov of the GRU (Soviet military intelligence
directorate). The ‘Aquarium’ of the title is the nickname given to GRU
headquarters in Moscow by those who worked there.”
Malgorzata Sidor.
AKQUARIUM 1 and 2. |
******
Wienczyslaw Sporecki
Born in 1964. Lives and works in the United Kingdom.
Artist
– Photography and installation. Co-founder of the Artists’
Association fabs.
“After the period of primary and secondary education,
1970–1983, as a result of his upbringing at home, he engaged in activities
against the political system effective at that time in Poland. This situation
also contributed to the blockage by the authorities of further normal education
and his forced enlistment in the army. 1981 saw a breakthrough in the decision
to become an artist. Initially, thanks to his alternative education and
independent contacts with lecturers of the Visual Arts High School in his
hometown, he was educating himself and working in the field of graphic design and
painting. His works at that time displayed serious political commitment; were
inspired by German expressionism and DADA, and in particular by Kurt
Schwitters, who fascinated him. These elements led to
the creation of ‘Mobile Gallery MERZ1’ – an author’s gallery in a suitcase,
whose space were some places that the artist reached during his artistic
journeys, during which he found alternative spaces of contact with audiences
(railway stations, private apartments, parks, underground passages, pedestrian
streets, etc.), transformed into Mobile Gallery MERZ1’s space for the duration
of art activity. After 1984, he gradually moved away from political involvement
– as a result, among others, of forced service in the army – which he abandoned
after taking up studies at the Faculty of Textile Design of the State Academic
School of Visual Arts in Lodz in 1986; which he subsequently abandoned at the
turn of 1988/89, disappointed by the lack of authority figures and the rigid
framework of the educational programme inhibiting individual development. He
defines this period by the sentence: ‘I never studied there, and only walked
around this school’s corridors, looking for something intriguing...’. Contacts
with independent culture circles, regular artistic travels around the country,
outside official institutions of visual arts, and intense creative work
resulted in a large number of presentations and his working out his own ways of
communicating with the audience, which can be termed ‘physical Internet’ – a
very direct, as for those times, relationship with the audience, which
consisted not only of the presentation of his own work, but also of placing
them in the context of the audience’s familiarity with art, including talks
about the circumstances of the making of the work, theory and the artist’s
ideas. After the political transformations in Poland and in Eastern European
countries in 1989, he joined the mainstream activities. Unfortunately, he soon
discovered the superficial nature of those transformations, which also led to
the elaboration of the method of ‘anonymous artist’ and ‘fractional existence’.
In 1996 he started to function as ‘Rudolf Schwarz – signum fractional
existence’. At the same time he resigned from functioning in the official
artistic circuit. Having met Malgorzata Sidor in September 1997, he began his
involvement in the idea of creating the Artists’ Association fabs, which has
become his only official form of functioning in the public space. The shows are
extremely intimate. They are documented exceptionally sparingly, and their
essence is a direct conversation with the audience, aimed at a thorough
description and conveying the intent of the piece. An important stage of the
artist's path was the work as documentary photographer in press agencies in 1998–2003,
deliberately subordinated to the idea of ‘fractional existence’. Since 10 April
2010 (the day of the tragic plane crash of the Polish presidential delegation
in Russia) he has lived in exile in the U.K.” Wienczyslaw Sporecki
ASYMMETRICAL THREAT. 2008
“(Wienczyslaw Sporecki) is interested in the structures of power and the
specific methods of influencing this power on people. He is trying to show the
impact of public institutions on the functioning of various communities… Several photographs depict soldiers
in a military unit. The signatures below are ‘Tal’, ‘Dioxin’, ‘Cortisol’,
‘Ergot’, ‘Bromine salt’. These are the names of toxic chemicals that can be
used in foodstuffs, which can not be seen. Tal easily dissolves in water. In
this way was poisoned former Russian intelligence agent, Alexander Litvinenko.
Dioxins can be smuggled in vegetables. They were used against the current
Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko. Cortisol can be given in meat. Ergot,
the hallucinogen-inducing hallucinogenic parasite can be used in flour, and the
brominated salt in salt. With these substances you can eliminate uncomfortable
people. These are all new activities
that have not been treated so far as military. And yet they use military
special forces. It turns out that today a soldier does not have to wear a
uniform and his weapon does not have to be a rifle.” Joanna
Kiwilszo, 2008
******
Piotr Szymor
Lives and works in Warsaw, Poland.
Translator and Editor. Co-founder of the Artists’ Association fabs.
Education
|
1978-1984. University of Lodz
M.A. in English Philology – specialisation:
English literature.
1989-1995 University of Oxford (St Hugh’s
College)
Postgraduate studies -
passed a D. Phil. Qualifying Exam
Doctoral thesis: Shakespeare’s Novella-shaped
World
|
Residencies as Translator
|
Spring 2007 Europäisches Übersetzer-Kollegium,
Straelen, Germany
20/07-20/08. 2007 Das Übersetzerhaus Looren in
Zürich, Switzerland
21/09-4/10.2009 The House of Literature at
Lefkes, Paros, Greece
|
https://factabstraction.