STAY IN SHAPE
Tymek Borowski, Zuza Golińska, Agnieszka Kurant & John Menick, Polen Performance (Justina Los, Mikołaj Sobczak), Iza Szostak
Opening: 12 June 2017, 7pm
Performative walks: Walkout, Zuza Golińska & Iza Szostak, with performers: Natalia Atmańska, Karolina Bielawska, Andrzej Godziński, Ignacy Hryniewicz, Oskar Malinowski, Mary Szydłowska 12 June 2017, 7.30 pm, 23 June 2017, 6 pm, 30 June 2017, 6 pm, start at the Studio Gallery
Performative lecture: Polen Performance, 13 June 2017, 7 pm
Exhibition: 13 June – 9 July 2017, Tuesday to Sunday 11 am – 7 pm
Sitting with our digital devices we eliminate the need for physical contact with other people. Swiping screens in order to keep track of notifications and updates, we are however unable to delegate all our activities to technology. Stay in Shape presents artists’ projects regarding issues such as collective effort and recreation in the automated world, in the form of interactive installations, works on paper and performances. For the duration of the exhibition Zuza Golińska will put her new installation to audience use. The artist analyses active leisure, discipline, and the space of Warsaw’s adjacent Defilad Square, referring to a defensive architecture of visible and hidden components such as spikes and other forms which are seemingly only decorative. Golińska develops this subject through a series of performative walks titled Walkout, realised in collaboration with choreographer Iza Szostak. Tymek Borowski’s Seed is a generative application designed to sensually stimulate its users by facilitating comfort in the workspace or at home. Production Line is a series of works developed since 2016 by Agnieszka Kurant in collaboration with John Menick. Thanks to an application created by the artists, drawings are transferred to paper by a robotic arm. These are the result of several thousand requests realised by anonymous workers of Amazon Mechanical Turk, who receive about 15 times the regular hourly rate of $1 per hour. AMT is a crowdsourcing on-demand agency that commissions simple tasks that cannot be executed by a artificial intelligence. Jeff Bezos, the founder of AMT, calls his service “artificial artificial intelligence”, referring to Wolfgang von Kempelen’s eighteenth-century chess machine with it’s hidden chess player controlling the game. Production Line investigates corporate strategies for using new forms of cheap global labor. The Polen Performance duo was invited to perform a lecture on their action Deutschlandtransport that took place in the fall of 2016. To celebrate the 35th anniversary of Polentransport by Joseph Beuys, Justina Los and Mikołaj Sobczak travelled in a wooden crate from Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź to Kunstpalast Museum in Düsseldorf, and likewise dedicated documentation of their work to the collection of the museum.
Curated by: Romuald Demidenko
We would like to extend our thanks to the BWA Gallery in Tarnów, where the project started as All the Time at Work exhibition in 2016.
The book that accompanies the project, was published in 2017 by Galeria Labirynt in Lublin in 2017.
