Dates:
12 Jul 2018
Location:
Metal, Liverpool
Project:
An evening of performance, screenings, talks, open discussion and food curated by Kasia Sobucka featuring Alicja Rogalska and Joanna Rajkowska with a durational performance by Katarzyna Perlak. An inclusive event looking at the post-Brexit socio-political landscape as well as rising nationalism and the rebirth of fascism across Europe. Part of the Illusion of Return project.
This programme was the result of Sobucka’s curatorial residency at Metal as part of ICF’s Beyond the Frame programme and was presented during the opening week of the 2018 Liverpool Biennial.
PROGRAMME
Alicja Rogalska – ‘Belly of the beast’
A lecture performance looking at the rise of nationalism, the far right, and fascism in Central and Eastern Europe and the UK. She takes as a starting point a selection of events widely reported in the media, and explores our psychological biases and cognitive mechanisms when confronted with the social, legal and ideological formations of fascism. What examples of creativity are employed by the extremes of the political spectrum? What does the employment of contemporary art aesthetics by the far right mean for politicised leftist art practice today?
Joanna Rajkowska – ‘Two Men and a Mattress’ (preceded by F & S Themersons’ ‘Adventures of a Good Citizen’ from 1937)
The UK premiere of ‘Two Men and a Mattress’, a film about an inexplicable urge that occasionally drives people blindly to their own destruction. Rajkowska’s film shows two British men who, on a hot summers day, suddenly take a mattress and drown it in a swamp. Before they do this, they discuss the historical moment they find themselves in and its ‘bloody awful’ character. The work echoes the wardrobe-carrying sequence in ‘The Adventures of a Good Citizen’ by Polish experimental filmmakers Franciszka and Stefan Themerson. This humorous, surrealist and inherently perturbing performance enacted by a group of friends, viewed now, evokes collective memories of the Holocaust, and a feeling of ‘the calm before the storm’, that was imminent at the time of its production.
Katarzyna Perlak – ‘Tighten Throat and Butterflies’
A durational performance during which the artist will be serving an ‘Everything will be fine’ cake. Audiences will be invited (one by one) to make a wish and blow out the candle. The work creates a space in which wishes can be remembered/identified and hope generated.
Project:
An evening of performance, screenings, talks, open discussion and food curated by Kasia Sobucka featuring Alicja Rogalska and Joanna Rajkowska with a durational performance by Katarzyna Perlak. An inclusive event looking at the post-Brexit socio-political landscape as well as rising nationalism and the rebirth of fascism across Europe. Part of the Illusion of Return project.
This programme was the result of Sobucka’s curatorial residency at Metal as part of ICF’s Beyond the Frame programme and was presented during the opening week of the 2018 Liverpool Biennial.
PROGRAMME
Alicja Rogalska – ‘Belly of the beast’
A lecture performance looking at the rise of nationalism, the far right, and fascism in Central and Eastern Europe and the UK. She takes as a starting point a selection of events widely reported in the media, and explores our psychological biases and cognitive mechanisms when confronted with the social, legal and ideological formations of fascism. What examples of creativity are employed by the extremes of the political spectrum? What does the employment of contemporary art aesthetics by the far right mean for politicised leftist art practice today?
Joanna Rajkowska – ‘Two Men and a Mattress’ (preceded by F & S Themersons’ ‘Adventures of a Good Citizen’ from 1937)
The UK premiere of ‘Two Men and a Mattress’, a film about an inexplicable urge that occasionally drives people blindly to their own destruction. Rajkowska’s film shows two British men who, on a hot summers day, suddenly take a mattress and drown it in a swamp. Before they do this, they discuss the historical moment they find themselves in and its ‘bloody awful’ character. The work echoes the wardrobe-carrying sequence in ‘The Adventures of a Good Citizen’ by Polish experimental filmmakers Franciszka and Stefan Themerson. This humorous, surrealist and inherently perturbing performance enacted by a group of friends, viewed now, evokes collective memories of the Holocaust, and a feeling of ‘the calm before the storm’, that was imminent at the time of its production.
Katarzyna Perlak – ‘Tighten Throat and Butterflies’
A durational performance during which the artist will be serving an ‘Everything will be fine’ cake. Audiences will be invited (one by one) to make a wish and blow out the candle. The work creates a space in which wishes can be remembered/identified and hope generated.
Dates:
12 Jul 2018
Location:
Metal, Liverpool
