Centre for Contemporary Art
Centre for Contemporary Art
Karol Radziszewski The Power of Secrets – photo: Bartek Górka – Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle
As Loft & Design at the Centre for Contemporary Art, we have made and installed installations for exhibitions, according to the intention and design of the artists:
- Karol Radziszewski – The Power of Secrets
- Ania Nowak – Can You Die of a Broken Heart?
- Karolina Zajączkowska – Dragana Bar
- Ewa Axelrad – Dziel i rządź
Ania Nowak – Can you die of a broken heart – photo: Bartosz Górka – Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle
Karolina Zajączkowska – Dragana Bar – photo Karolina Zajączkowska – Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle
Ewa Axelrad – View of the exhibition in Vilnius – photo: Ewa Axelrad – Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle
Karolina Zajączkowska – Dragana Bar – 2 photo Karolina Zajączkowska
Centre for Contemporary Art – U-Jazdowski – the only such residency programme in Poland
The Centre for Contemporary Art – U-Jazdowski is the only residency programme in Poland operating with such intensity and agility and one of the leading ones in Europe according to curator Marianna Dąbkowska.
The Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle also runs a programme that no other cultural centre, museum or gallery has. The residency programme, conducted since 2002, has already hosted over two hundred people (artists, designers, curators and researchers). It is worth noting here that the effect of the participants’ work does not necessarily have to be an exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Art. They can also include a performance, seminar, lecture, performance or symposium or even a discussion. The participants do not have to have formal artistic education either.
The Power of Secrets – Karol Radziszewski – Centre for Contemporary Art
The Power of Secrets by Karol Radziszewski’s at the Centre for Contemporary Art at the Ujazdowski Castle is a solo, experimental exhibition which for the first time presents the art and work of the artist in such a comprehensive and cross-sectional way.
The main theme of the exhibition is the performative character of the queer archives, which democratize history and restore the memory of the displaced past.
Private and public stories and politics and intimacy
In the exhibition The Power of Secrets, politics intertwines with intimacy, while public and private stories. The viewers can see works devoted to queer heroines and heroes – Ewa Hołuszko and Taras Szewczenko, the action “Jacinth”. They also attempt to recreate the erotic exhibition of Wojciech Skrodzki from the 1970s. The artist quotes fairy-tale and artistic drawings from his childhood years in his 1989 series of paintings and murals, as well as the activities of the Queer Archives Institute. It is a para-institution founded by the artist, which deals with the study of the queer identity of Central and Eastern Europe.
In his work, the artist uses and applies unique tools for the installation and assembly of materials. He composes documents with scraps of memories, and combines facts with fantasy. He confuses clues in order to indicate alternative paths of remembering. He perpetuates the fate of communities and reveals individual experiences, going beyond the Polish borders.
Artists – Libuše Jarcovjákova, Natalia LL, Ryszard Kisiel, Wolfgang Tillmans, Canadian collective General Idea
The exhibition The Power of Secrets is created by various artists. They show multiple threads in broad artistic and historical contexts. Their works make up a common story about the fate of queer communities. U-jazdowski presents works by Libuše Jarcovjákova, Natalia LL, Ryszard Kisiel, Wolfgang Tillmans, and the Canadian collective General Idea.
The events accompanying the exhibition included a review of Karol Radziszewski’s films, meetings and guided tours with artists, including AA Bronson.
Karol Radziszewski – curator, fascinator, collector, amateur historian
Karol Radziszewski is a curator, fascinator, collector and amateur historian. He moves smoothly between performance and visual arts. The exhibition at U-jazdowski presents and reveals the wealth of the artist’s creative practices and methods.
Can you die of a broken heart? – Ania Nowak – Centre for Contemporary Art
Is it possible to die of a broken heart? This is a project where the author – Ania Nowak – reflects on the confusing relation between the body, environment and psyche. She also looks at the difficult explanation of contemporary illnesses. Mateusz Szumanówka has been the exhibition curator.
Ania Nowak
Ania Nowak deals with the area of widely understood choreography on a daily basis. She creates solo and collective works in which she examines the tension of language and understatements and body transformations. She conducts research on love as a strategy for generating knowledge. Within this framework, she attempts to redefine sensuality and examines unstable structures of care and affective economies. Her works have so far been presented at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, National Center of Dance in Bucharest, Sophiensaele and Akademie der Künste in Berlin, New Theatre, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Art Stations Foundation in Poznań and Arts Santa Mònica in Barcelona. She graduated in choreography from the HZT Berlin. She lives and works in Germany in Berlin.
Sickness as a condition
The artist is interested in disease as a state in which the boundary between norm and pathology is constantly negotiated. According to her, the role of the language used to describe the horror of the body, its difficulties and the relationship between time and disease is crucial here.
Tropical landscape fantasies
The artist’s project is a fantasy about a tropical landscape digested by a fever of unknown origin. The protagonists of the exhibition are two Agapornis parakeets, who were under the care of Ms. Agnieszka Kłos – one of the employees of the Centre for Contemporary Art. In Polish this kind of parrots is commonly called inseparable because they are famous for building permanent monogamous relationships. Contrary to popular opinion, after the death of one of the partners, the other does not die of longing, but is able to enter into a new relationship.
Fourth edition of Project Room
The exhibition Ania Nowak at the Centre for Contemporary Art was the fourth edition of Project Room. As part of this series, the Centre for Contemporary Art in U-Jazdowski presented the output and work of Polish talented artists of the young generation. All exhibitions were prepared deliberately for this space and had a premiere character. So far, the projects by Maria Toboła, Weronika Gęsicka and Grzegorz Stefański have been presented, while after the Ania Nowak exhibition the projects by Karolina Mełnicka and Karolina Babińska have been presented.
The project consisted of a videoperformance and performance, which was presented as part of the “Project Room” series.
Stress-induced cardiomyopathy – Takotsubo syndrome
When talking about the starting point of her exhibition, she said that colloquially called Fractured Heart Syndrome in medicine is referred to as stress-induced cardiomyopathy or simply takotsubo syndrome. It is a heart failure leading even to death, which is caused by our emotional life and the difficult situations we face. The author was interested in various diseases, illnesses and dysfunctions of the body, which on the one hand are common, and on the other hand are socially mysterious, such as autoimmune diseases. These are diseases that have always been known, but which have been described by medicine only for several decades. For the purposes of the exhibition, the author has created a narrative where she speaks a medical-emotional language.
Autoimmune diseases as body rebellion against the modern world
Mateusz Szumanówka, the exhibition curator, said in the context of the exhibition that the unknown etiology of particular diseases and the fact that the mechanisms that stand with them are unclear, make the feeling of exclusion double and bring to mind, for example, the 19th century hysteria epidemic. He proposes to look here at the analysis of autoimmune diseases as a rebellion of the body against how man functions in the contemporary system. The relationship between physical and mental health, in spite of the great development of science, remains undiscovered.
Young generation artists at the Centre for Contemporary Art
The exhibition Can you die of a broken heart? was the fourth edition of “Project Room”. As part of this series, U-jazdowski presented the works of Polish artists of the young generation.
Other projects – EIP Office Warsaw – Adidas Runners Warsaw – Studio HBO Poland – Industrial Mezzanine with Library
We have experience in innovative projects, therefore in our portfolio you will find such projects as EIP Warsaw Office, where we have comprehensively manufactured and installed a system of doors and loft walls. Other groundbreaking projects that we have co-created are Adidas Runners Warsaw or Studio HBO Poland located in the Ethos building at Plac Trzech Krzyży in the heart of Warsaw, which has been recognized in the prestigious competitions Prime Property Prize 2018 and CIJ Awards Poland 2018. A large, interesting and unusual project is our Industrial Mezzanine with a library in loft style.