ALTERNATIVA OPENING PROGRAM 25 -27. 05. 2012

25.05 Friday

12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. Professional Media Press Preview and curator guided tour – conference room / Wyspa Institute of Art

3:00 p.m. Alternativa 2010 - 2011 - movie by Elvin Flamingo - preview screening - conference room / Wyspa Institute of Art

5:00 p.m. Alfredo Cramerotti - Tagging and Other Amenities of Contemporary Life (lecture in English, Polish translation) – conference room / Wyspa Institute of Art

9:00 p.m. PARIAH (R&S / London) – Buffet Club


26.05 Saturday

6:00 p.m.  Alternativa official opening - Hall 90 B

8:00 p.m. Szelest Spadających Papierków - concert, Hall 90 B

9:00 p.m. Pink Freud - concert, Hall 90 B

10:30 p.m. after party - Buffet Club
exhibitions open until midnight


27.05 Sunday

2:00 p.m. Pascal Gielen - Biennale and the art scene: post-institution in post-Ford creativity factory (lecture in English, Polish translation) – conference room / Wyspa Institute of Art

8:00 p.m. NILS PROJECT (Paris) - premiere concert / Buffet Club

Alternativa 2012
Artistic Director: Aneta Szyłak
Wyspa Institute of Art

www.wyspa.art.pl
www.alternativa.org.pl

Professional preview days May 25-27, 2012, official opening May 26 at 6 pm
Registration and inquiries: alternativa2012(at)wyspa.art.pl, pr-wyspa(at)wyspa.art.pl
The shows will run until September 30

Wyspa Institute of Art invites you for the opening days of Alternativa 2012, a project that seeks diverse modes of knowing and explores possible ways of being and acting in contemporaneity. This year’s programme comprises two exhibitions, entitled respectively Materiality and Wyspa. Now is Now.

Materiality’s artist list includes:
Lara Almarcegui, Rosella Biscotti and Kevin van Braak, Maureen Connor and Kadambari Baxi, André Cepeda and Eduardo Matos, Marcelo Expósito, Iñaki Garmendia, Martí Guixé, Sally Gutierrez, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Sjef Henderickx, Arne Hendriks, Mateusz Herczka, Ernst van der Hoeven, Katarzyna Józefowicz, Hiwa K, Grzegorz Klaman, Kasia Krakowiak, Robert Kuśmirowski, MML STUDIO [Michał Mądracki, Maciej Mądracki, Gilles Lepore], Paulo Mendes, Lex Pott, Partizan Publik, Patrícia Azevedo Santos, Hito Steyerl, Michał Szlaga, Ronald van Tienhoven, Mariusz Waras, Jólan van der Wiel, Erlea Maneros Zabala, Silvia Zayas as well as Lisa Schmidt-Colinet, Alexander Schmoeger, and Florian Zeyfang.

The second exhibition, Wyspa. Now is Now, is curated by Ewa Małgorzata Tatar, Dominik Kuryłek and Anna Ptak and architecturally defined by Krzysztof Skoczylas. The team focused on the legacy of Wyspa and the content of its archive while insisting on the functional context of contemporaneity. The exhibition communicates both the interpretative capacity of the archive and explores Wyspa’s methodologies, concepts of communality, discursive approach and what the curators of the project call "an effort of continuity”. Now is Now consists of rich archival material including documentation of early Wyspa-associated artists and opens the site of ephemeral projects and performative interventions by the young generation of artists, such as Agata Biskup and Przemek Czepurko, Mateusz Kula in collaboration with Aleksandra Jach and Krzysztof Skoczylas, Mikołaj Moskal, Konrad Smoleński, Pavel Sterec as well as Zorka Wollny.

Artists’ talks and lecture performances include those by Hito Steyerl, Lara Almacequi, Emilio Moreno, Marcelo Expósito, Sally Gutierrez and Oliver Ressler.

The list of distinguished speakers who will deliver talks during Alternativa 2012 includes: Franco Berardi, Alfredo Cramerotti, Okwui Enwezor, Pascal Gielen, Miguel Robles Duran and Irit Rogoff. Please check our website regularly for schedules of talks and workshops and updates.


Alternativa 2010–2012 is a project prepared by Wyspa Institute of Art and the City of Gdańsk, with additional committed funds from the European Commission, the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage as well as the Province of Pomerania, among others.

Materiality is a two-year European project that is being developed in collaboration between Wyspa, Vessel in Bari, Polytechnico in Tomar and Kibla in Maribor.

Lecture by Hito Steyerl

13th of April (Friday)
5 PM / Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk
Admission free


Steyerl will talk about her recent projects, especially "In Free Fall" about the recycling of media images and the beginning of the current financial crisis, as well as "The Kiss" a laser scanner video about an incident in the Bosnian war in 1993. How do documentary expectations shift with 3d technologies? And what does this have to do with a "withdrawal from representation"?

Hito Steyerl - filmmaker and writer, based in Berlin.
Steyerl started out as an essay filmmaker and successively moved into the artfield. Her main interests are the digital image, it´s circulation and it´s materiality. She works a a professor for New Media in the Fine Arts Department of the University of Arts Berlin.

Lecture organized in cooperation with Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk

Julia Gierczak - w meeting within the framework of re.act.feminism #2, Wyspa Institute of Art:

18th of April (Thursday)
6 PM / Wyspa Institute of Art
Admission free

A lecture devoted to the selected film and quasi-film realisations of a French cinema creator Catherine Breillat – it is an attempt to find lost coherence on the grounds of psycho-analytical theory without which one cannot speak about (post)feminism in the newest cinema. It will tackle its interferences with various areas of pop culture, such as in films Barbe Bleue or A Sleeping Beauty and its oscillation around pornography in Romance and The Anatomy of Hell – these are the two extreme directions which Breillat takes and, simultaneously, the most important poles of (post)feminism in the contemporary audio-visual culture.

Julia Gierczak – born in 1983, a PhD writer at the Chair of Culture Studies of Gdańsk University, cultural animator, film-specialist, Polish philologist and a book editor, working in the editorial team of "Panoptikum”. She is working on a PhD dissertation devoted to various aspects of art of acting in François Ozon’s films. Her research concentrates mostly on the gender perspective and queer issues in film studies, the theory of cinema and inter-media practice, along with the art of acting in contemporary cinema with particular emphasis on British and French creators and selected aspects of the cinema of the Far East (China, Hong Kong, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam).

A meeting within the framework of re.act.feminism #2, Wyspa Institute of Art:

27 of March (Tusday)
7 PM / Wyspa Institute of Art
Admission free

The lecture will permit the public to view through exhibitions such as: „Gender Check”, „Inside the visible”, „WACK”, „Re.act.feminism”, or „Niezgrabne przedmioty” /Clumsy Objects. I would like to consider various strategies of working with the viewer using the medium of an exhibition. I am specially interested in this issue in the context of feminist art which, as I feel, chose as its objective the redefinition of the political being the redistribution of the sensual beyond the objectifying gaze.

Ewa Małgorzata Tatar - an art critic and historian, editor and curator. She co-operates with the Wyspa Art Institute in Gdañsk, the National Museum in Cracow and the Korporacja Ha!art Publishers. She is an editor of "Panoptikum" magazine. Her special interest lies in exhibiting and curatiotrial strategies, next to critical and institutional practice, as well as curatorship as a methodology of an art history. She is now writing her PhD dissertation on feminist art in Poland.

Opening:
Friday 3rd February 2012, 19.00, Wyspa Institute of Art

Exhibition on view:
Tuesday - Sunday, 12.00-18.00


Maryam Jafri is an artist working in video, performance and photography. Informed by a research based, interdisciplinary process her artworks are marked by a visual language poised between film and theater and a series of narrative experiments and oscillating between script and document, fragment and whole. Jafri’s practice often starts from something that seems concrete whether that be an archive or a written text and then disrupts its established form. As Bridget Crone states in the work, "Staged Archive" (2008), for example, Jafri worked in relation to the National Archives of Ghana to create a film that questioned the archive‘s relationship to knowledge and ‘truth’ by staging the archive through a series of tableaux that referred to the visual and narrative codes of TV and cinema such as the court room drama, for example.