1,2,3… Avant-Gardes - Art as Contextual Art. Film/Art between Experiment and Archive  is the next stage of an exhibition and research project that explores the “continuous” history of experimentation in film and art and the interaction of both fields.

Grounded in the extensive Polish experimental film output of the 1970s, 1,2,3… Avant-Gardes will offer a selection of films mostly produced by Polish artist from that period, whilst including contemporary international artistic proposals that constitute a challenge for the interpretation of the history of experimental cinema. The exhibition follows a schema structured under the following headings: Analytical Strategies. Games and Participation. Political Film and Soc Art. Image and Sound. Imagination. Consumption. This specific assembly will structure the works with the aim of analysing both formally and conceptually the use of experimental strategies within visual production.

        The show at sala rekalde is a new contribution of 1,2,3… Avant-Gardes entitled Art as Contextual Art. It departs from main ideas developed by Polish conceptual artist Jan Świdziński who in early 1970s wrote manifests and produced art works based on radical ideas about the importance of working within a specific socio-political context. His proposition for producing Contextual Art instead of a more universal Conceptual Art was crucial for the Polish art of the 70s. The exhibition will try to analyse the political, aesthetical and theoretical implications of working with the context of some Polish artists active in the 1970s and will also expose the different ways of negotiating with this issue in contemporary art production.

Understood in a “horizontal” way 1,2,3… Avant-Gardes points to different ideas of modernism and the pluralism of conceptual film and art production which existed parallel to one another during the Cold War period and still exists today. Read in a “vertical” way, it stands for the search for a possible historicisation of Polish avant-garde art and film, a linearity, to be discovered and reconstructed against many distortions in Polish history over the last 80 years.

The Polish film selection from the 1970s includes works by the following artists and producers:

Akademia Ruchu, Antosz & Andzia, Kasimierz Bendkowski, Bogdan Dziworksi, Marcin Giżycki, Janusz Haka, Oskar Hansen, Tadeusz Junak, Jacques de Koning, Grzegorz Królikiewicz, Zofia Kulik, Paweł Kwiek, Przemysław Kwiek, Natalia LL, Jolanta Marcolla, Ewa Partum, Andrzej Pawłowski, Zygmunt Piotrowski, Józef Robakowski, Zbigniew Rybczyński, Zygmunt Rytka, Jadwiga Singer, Zdzisław Sosnowski, Mieczysław Szczuka, Michał Tarkowski, Teresa Tyszkiewicz, Ryszard Waśko, Jan Stanisław Wojciechowski and Krzysztof Zarębski.


Also on show are presented works by the following contemporary artists:

Paweł Althamer/Artur Żmijewski, Bernadette Corporation, Matthew Buckingham, Discoteca Flaming Star, Jon Mikel Euba, Iñaki Garmendia, Judith Hopf/Katrin Pesch, Igor Krenz, Jonathan Monk, Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de Rooij, Wilhelm Sasnal, Sra. Polaroiska en Sillón de Taller and Florian Zeyfang.


1,2,3… Avant-Gardes. Art as Contextual Art. Film/Art between Experiment and Archive initiated in the CCA Ujazdowski Castle in December 2006 was curated by Lukasz Ronduda and Florian Zeyfang. The exhibition, following the divisions and theoretical background described above, brought together for the first time the idea of combining archive material based on the 1970s Polish experimental film production with contemporary artistic proposals.

In the Künstlerhaus in Stuttgart the exhibition, curated by Lukasz Ronduda, Florian Zeyfang and Axel John Wieder, was inaugurated in June 2007. This time, the exhibition was concentrating more extensively on the experiments of Polish architect Oskar Hansen and his concept termed Open Form which was originally developed within the context of international late-modernist debates on architecture in the 1950s and later taken up and further pursued in the direction of film and performance.

At sala rekalde, the show curated by Lukasz Ronduda, Florian Zeyfang and Leire Vergara adopts now the initial structure presented in Warsaw once more but with a different display designed by Centrala architects of Poland. A new list of contemporary artists from the context of the Basque Country and Spain have been added. Moreover, a symposium will take place in January and February 2008. It will be organised around the artistic potentials from the past and present time of working with specific contexts. More information on the symposium is given in an enclosed document.