Made in Blue Republic

The multi-site exhibition Made in Blue Republic will be on view from March 10th through April 2nd 2017 at the BWA Zielona Góra (Art Exhibitions Bureau, curator – Wojciech Kozłowski) and from March 17th through May 4th  2017 at the Arsenal Gallery, Białystok (curator – Monika Szewczyk).

The Polish-Canadian Blue Republic collective acquired international recognition for their aesthetic interventions in both interior and urban space. With their exhibition Made in Blue Republic, they continue the development of their practice through the engagement of planetary and post-human thinking. This includes a series of projects operating in the ephemeral, absurdist and linguistic spheres including Tape Murals, Water Drawings and other spatial interventions, each work managing to tread the threshold separating object from environment with equal amounts of wit and care.

Made In Blue Republic comprises an expansive but precariously built environment, titled Speeding from Beautiful Infections, which encompasses ten years’ worth of found objects that provisionally establish multiple routes and trajectories throughout one of BWA Zielona Góra’s galleries. Each construction simultaneously leads and hems in the wandering viewer in an installation intended to mirror the impermanence of civilising and civilisation constructs. This is further emphasized through Blue Republic’s ubiquitous “tape murals” – improvised drawings created with black masking tape, spread along the floor and walls, dividing, tracing and approaching the gallery’s architectural space as both medium and author.

Expanding upon the ephemeral nature of Tape Murals, site-specific land art series Water Drawings, shown in a video documentary at Białystok’s Galeria Arsenal, partially eludes the human sensorium by engaging the transformation of physical states in improvised performances where water is applied to the hot rock surfaces of Canada’s Georgian Bay. The installation Limited Activities rounds out the artists’ experiments with what they have dubbed the “trans-objects”, or matter that has been shredded, pulverised, evaporated and is thought to be destroyed.

Blue Republic’s prolific succession of anti-monumental installations and displacements uniquely frame contemporary discourses around embodied intelligence and hierarchies of form. They accomplish this primarily by interrogating their own status as artists, shifting between positions as authors and intermediaries. This is best underscored by the exhibition title, Made in Blue Republic where the use of ‘in’ rather than ‘by’ de-centres the artists’ authorship, suggesting that the environmental circumstances of the production and presentation of their work constitute a collaborative process of creation.

Blue Republic is a collective of two artists: Anna Passakas and Radoslow Kudlinski.
Their artistic research and exhibition practice is primarily focused on site-specific and public interventions including installation, printed matter and performance-based work. Some of the recurring themes are entrapment in the games of power, violence, contemporary ‘hyper-complexities’, homelessness in the world, homelessness in nature, manufactured concerns, fabricated sensitivities, confabulations, sentymentalization. Blue Republic took part in international projects forefronting anti-poverty education and activism in Brazil’s favelas and worked with inmates at the Ontario’s correctional system. They share their time between Krakow Poland and Toronto, Canada where they are represented by Georgia Scherman Projects.
 
Selected exhibitions include: 2013-14 Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture (Shenzhen/Hong Kong); DAAD Gallery (Berlin); Ludwig Forum for International Art (Aachen); CCA Ujazdowski Castle (Warsaw); Galleria D’Arte Moderna di Bologna (Italy); Galerie Julio Gonzales (Paris), Darling Foundry (Montreal, Canada), Oakville Galleries (Oakville, Canada), Doris McCarthy Gallery (Toronto, Canada)
 
Later this year Blue Republic will participate in Wanderlust, an exhibition on international action art at SUNY’s UB Art Galleries (Buffalo, New York), with Bas Jan Ader, Francis Alÿs, John Baldessari, Cardiff/Miller, Mona Hatoum, Ana Mendieta, Wangechi Mutu, Gabriel Orozco, and others.