Join exhibition curator Post Brother for a tour of the exhibition of IZA TARASEWICZ

Galeria Arsenał invites to a guided tour of the exhibition “By the apparent impossibility of arranging signs” by the exhibition curator Post Brothers

 

6 December 2014 (Saturday), 11.00

Curator: Post Brothers

Place: Galeria Arsenał, ul. A. Mickiewicza 2, Białystok

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Iza Tarasewicz’s objects are not static entities, but materials and signs in constant and continuous fluctuation. The artist’s sensitive examination of base materials is an interpretive exercise that demonstrates moments of fusion and fission and emphasizes missing, compressed, distorted, displaced, or degraded information. Each object and arrangement functions as a temporary proposition tested through rigorous experimentations with matter. Her configurations are attempts at activating order and energetic relationships, while equally exposing her processes and elements to the turbulence of chaos and failure. As the poet Louis Armand noted, “Tarasewicz’s work invites us to envisage ‘possibility’—not implied possibilities, other possibilities, unrealized possibilities, but…the formal lineaments of possibility as such.” 

Born and raised in Bialystok, Iza Tarasewicz spent the last year on residency at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. Over this time, her projects increasingly focused on lines, graphs, and models that were appropriated and transferred from statistical, technical, spiritual, biological, thermodynamic, and cosmological diagrams—figures of thoughts and charts of relations that systematize knowledge and abstractly describe the interaction of phenomena. Her exhibition at Galeria Arsenalis the third variation in a continuously evolving series of presentations that began with her solo exhibitions Strange Attractors (Polish Insitute, Berlin), and Collaborating Objects Radiating Environments (Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, in cooperation with the Foundation for Polish-German Cooperation). Operating within specific material and productive constraints, for this project the artist has produced a series of dynamic systems manifested in a three-dimensional phase space. Each sequence of lines, surfaces, bodies, and aggregations are at once autonomous and interacting in a broader composition within a field of continuously shifting observation. Not only are the works attempts at spatializing information (implanting bodies in a field so as to elaborate laws of correlation, affect, and mutual position), but they also accentuate the ways objects themselves produce and distort perceptions of space. The rationalist conceits of linear perspective and Cartesian mapping are deconstructed and amplified, deployed both as disorienting abstractions and as forms that yield a combination of possibilities and inhibitions. Space is continuously folded, stretched, compressed, disfigured, contorted, broken apart, and reintegrated.

By liberating illustrative representations and graphical systems from their sources and emphasizing the base materiality of the components, her works run contrary to a purely semiotic understanding of the diagram, according to which diagrams function independently of their concrete execution. Instead, Tarasewicz’s objects function more as tools: contingent, temporary, and variable engines of information that chart lines of flight between scales, dimensions, and events, displaying the consequences of entering objects into a system. They are at once representations of micro and macro processes, and bare demonstrations of their own thingness, the result of properties and constitutive relationships. Each work charts the haptic transformation of energy and concepts as they move from phenomena to representations and back again, making visible both the moments when symbols fail and when transmission and transposition yields unexpected results. More of a speculation than a collection of things, the exhibition is the presentation of an unpresentability.

 

text by Post Brothers   

 

IZA TARASEWICZ was born in 1981 and raised in a small village near Bialystok, Poland. She graduated from the Faculty of Sculpture and Performing Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan, Poland in 2008. Her works serve as temporary conduits for a meeting of substances, energies, locations, temporalities, intonations, and concepts, which the artist identifies as only events in a continuous series of material and symbolic interactions. Her sensitive examination and transformation of materials is a complex interpretive exercise that often manifests in objects, spaces, graphs, drawings, sounds, videos, and performative actions. Her objects and arrangements are base things that resist the binary of natural and artificial, joining together quotidian, ignoble, or emblematic stuff such as clay, plaster, concrete, gold, steel, glass, tar, animal fat, skin, fur, intestines, plasticine, plant fibers, dung, and ash. Often bordering on hylozoism (the concept that all matter and non-matter has life), each object or arrangement is invested in exploring the affecting nature of its material makeup and challenges the viewer to consider both the vital energetic relationships in all things and the inextricable interrelation of chaos and order. Her investigative practice distills, combines, deconstructs and redirects materials so as to rediscover hidden aspects and relations, while equally signifying a contingency or deficiency in rational, human understanding to access such properties.

text by Post Brothers