Raise the curtain – (or) theatre on sale

Basia Bańda (born 1980), Chief Judge Group [Aleksandra Kubiak (1978), Karolina Wiktor (1979)] and Tomasz Kowalski (1984) are the artists, who since few years have strongly made their presence felt on the Polish art scene. The motive of curtain, scenography, theatricalization occur in their works as one of the essential formal and ideological matter. Each of them works it out into a slightly different way.

Basia Bańda dresses her paintings in children’s clothes, covers them, but also she gives the opportunity to uncover them, to undo the buttons, or to raise the skirt. She takes photos of herself, by theatricalizing pose against the lens, setting up tocamera performance. She creates object-dolls that are not necessarily used to childish dramas.

Chief Judge Group introduced the virus of performance to the play “Magnetism of the Heart” directed by Grzegorz Jarzyna in the Warsaw Theatre of Diversity (Teatr Rozmaitości), allowing the audience to interfere in the course of events, at the same time violating the convention. The strategy that enables the audience to co-create also appeared in the action of TVP Culture channel, where the artists “live” carried out phone orders of the anonymous viewers.

Tomasz Kowalski draws sometimes real – unreal curtains that are a little bit dusty, covering the scene that might be empty or hiding another secret. The artist often places his objects in parastage design arrangements – that could be the scenery for further, unpredictable events. Appearing characters carry out rituals or actions into the rhythm of the orders of invisible director.

The exhibition space will be the area of a backstage journey. A bit artificial, a backstage, a dusty wing, where we arrive as for the sale in a closed theatre. Where everything was not supposed to be shown us, but if eventually is, the next meaning is discovered, the next sense of never ending drama.

Wojciech Kozłowski