Sebastian Cichocki
March 10 – 25, 2005
Sebastian Cichocki (Poland) was the first curator invited in the Visiting Curatorial Initiative program. His lecture series as well as the exhibition “compulsive_handmades” featured the works of Artur Zmijevski and Pawel Althamer, Mariola Brillowska, Azorro Group and Igor Krenz. The collaboration between Cichocki and press to exit project space represented the first attempt at introducing the contemporary art scene in Poland to the Macedonian audience.
March 12 – 25, 2005
“compulsive_handmades” exhibition
Sebastian Cichocki’s curatorial project “compulsive_handmades” has no define beginning or end. It’s a collection of intimate stories about repeated gestures and activities, patterns of behavior, mechanical production of objects, about recording of movement and persistency. press to exit project space will host an experiment combining art, temporary architecture and quasi-psychiatry becoming a place to experience a permanent déja-vu.
“compulsive_handmades” introduces recent work by Hubert Czeropok, Igor Krenz, Anna Niesterowicz, Marzena Novak, Anna Ostoya, Jadwiga Sawicka, Julia Wojcik, and Arthur Zmijewski.
Sebastian Cichocki also incorporated a series of lectures presented in conjunction with the exhibition.
Thursday, March 17, 2005, 20:00 h.
“compulsive_talks”
Curator’s talk emphasizing the contemporary Polish art scene illustrated with short films and slides.
Friday, March 18, 2005, 20:00 h.
“...and other Phenomena”
Presentation of selected collaborative films by Artur Zmijewski and Pawel Althamer form the series “So Called Waves and other Phenomena of the Mind” and screening of Artur Zmijewski’s “An eye for an eye”, “KR WP”, “Singing lesson”, “Lisa”, and “80064”.
The series “So Called Waves and other Phenomena of the Mind” was devoted to researching the possibility of communicating non-intellectual experiences.
Althamer declares that mind-altering substances can be used to expend perception. He is filmed while under the influence of various substances or hypnosis and is interviewed by Zmijewski about the spiritual world.
Saturday, March 19, 2005, 20:00 h.
„Katharina & Witt, Fiction & Reality” (1997)
Screening of film by Mariola Brillowska.
Interpol’s agents Katharina and Witt settle accounts with art critics, art theory, art business and art scene. For this fight the agents are provided with convenient organs: eyes, ears and mouth are reduced to one mere whole. Strategically the agents infiltrate the market pretending to be owners of the gallery.
Mariola Brillowska is a Polish artist based in Germany.
12 - 25 March 2005
Process and art 1966-2005
Oskar Hansen “Process and Art” – competition entry, Museum of Modern Art, Skopje, 1966 (co-authors: Svein Hatloy, Barbara Cybulska, Lars Fasting/ collaboration: Jerzy Dowgiallo)
“Process and Art 1966-2005” is shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje as a part of “compulsive_handmades”, project curated by Sebastian Cichocki.
Art is unpredictable in its development. We assumed that the role of the contemporary gallery should be to go towards that unknown in art. Not only exhibiting it, but encouraging and provoking its birth. These were the criteria our project was to fulfill. As a result, we proposed dividing the space into two parts: a permanent exhibition and a space devoted to aiding the birth of not yet existing art. The first part was a conventional exposition based on Euclidean geometry. The second part was a quintessence of a contemporary art museum, and had an additional situational guidance – it was to be in contrast to an idealistic in expression, static form of a nearby mosque. It was a transformable structure, controlled numerically by the artist, emerging from under the ground in the shape of mobile trapezoidal supports lifted by telescopic poles. The form, which followed the idea of a modularly repeated fan, made it possible to obtain space combining hyperbolic and non-Euclidean geometry. An open, modular structure actually provoked the space to grow. The electronically controlled “gallery instrument ”added the provocation of new art to the rich offer of the exposition itself - sculpting the architectural space “live,” in front of the viewers’ very eyes – creating visual performances. The gallery and its specific form were to exist for as long as there was an exposition in place; then, before it was replaced with a new one, the gallery would go back under the ground, and the mosque dome would again dominate the site, until the search for new forms began anew. The visual coexistence of two different spaces manifests the Open Form idea here. Man, an artist or viewer would perceive the gallery and its situation as special – an innovation-stimulating visual influence instrument.
(Oskar Hansen)
Sebastian Cichocki (1975) is a programme director of Kronika – an art space in Bytom (the Upper Silesia, Poland). He works as an art-critic, writer and curator. Cichocki co-operates with different cultural institutions in Poland and Germany, such as the Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw and Buro Kopernikus – German-Polish Cultural Projects, Berlin. He published over two hundred texts on contemporary art in cultural magazines, Internet sites and exhibition catalogues and anthologies. Cichocki has lectured in such places as National Gallery of Art Zacheta (Warsaw), Manifesta Foundation (Amsterdam) and Kunstverein in Hamburg.