JÓZEF ROBAKOWSKI

Artist talk with Józef Robakowski
on Saturday, January 14, 2012 at 11 a.m.
 

The Józef Robakowski solo exhibition at the Arsenal Gallery in Białystok presents the artist in a dialogue with other artists. Józef Robakowski – a classic of Polish experimental film and a leading figure of the avant-garde – appears not only as a filmmaker and visual artist, but also as an initiator, curator, and organizer of art groups, exhibitions and artistic events.

The exhibition premiered at New York’s Ludlow 38 gallery in the spring of 2011 and was Józef Robakowski’s first solo show in the US. In 2012 the project will also be presented at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany (May 5 – August 5). To accompany the show, a trilingual publication in Polish, English, and German was prepared in collaboration with the above two institutions and the Leipzig-based publisher Spector Books.

The Robakowski exhibition is focused on collaborative and relational work, which has been an inherent part of his art practice from the beginning of the1960s until the present. The selected works and archival materials shown in the exhibition and published in the book reveal the significant part of Robakowski’s work encompassing dialogue with other artists.

The political dimension of Robakowski’s art is specifically evident in works which refer to the period of martial law in Poland (1981–83); among them, the film State of War (1982). Robakowski is shown as a creator of experimental works responding to the specificities of his context, functioning outside the official museum and gallery system to present politically critical output. The important issues of trust, collective expression and shared experience are shown through activities and actions initiated by the Exchange Gallery, established by the artist in his own apartment in Łódź in 1978.

The exhibition brings together films and video works such as Rynek  [Market], 1970 (in collaboration with Ryszard Meissner and Tadeusz Junak), produced within the framework of the Workshop of the Film Form; Attention Light!, 1981–2004 (in collaboration with Paul Sharits and Wiesław Michalak); Art is Power!, 1984–85 (music by Slovenian avant-garde group Laibach) as well as Oratorio for Katarzyna Kobro (2011). The curatorial models and strategies behind Robakowski’s working methods are represented through documents and photographs showing the activities of the groups he belonged to (Workshop of the Film Form and Zero 61), and materials pertaining to the action titled Artistic Pilgrimage, which took place in Łódź in 1983, along with photo-documentation from the exhibition Lochy Manhattanu, Łódź, 1989. The exhibition also includes a video library featuring selected DVDs with films, videos, and television programs such as Witkacy (1980), Władysław Strzemiński – Construction of Vision  (1993), and Choices – An Artist from Eastern Europe Speaks Out by Marielle Nitoslawska (1987). The exhibition also contains a number of books, catalogues, documentation photographs and ephemera produced by and drawn from the collection of the Exchange Gallery.

Partners of the exhibition: Adam Mickiewicz Institute in Warsaw, MINI/Goethe-Institut Curatorial Residencies Ludlow 38, New York, ZKM in Karlsruhe, and CEC ArtsLink, New York.