ARTIST
JACEK MALINOWSKI
DURATION
2007-04-27 – 2007-05-16
Vernissage: April 27, 2007, at 18:00 (Friday)
ul. Kochanowskiego 10 (entrance from the yard)
ABOUT EXHIBITION
The film by Jacek Malinowski presented in Galeria Novej fits in perfectly with the theme of the Krakow Decade of Photography – “Reality and the Document”. The artist takes it in a different way, surprising for the viewer who stops trusting his intuition every minute and allows himself to be drawn into a specific game. Using the form of a paradument, the artist balances on the border between fiction and truth, creation and the photographic perpetuation of reality.
Jacek Malinowski known from the film Halfwoman presented in the Warsaw Zachęta is one of the graduates of Grzegorz Kowalski’s studio, the famous “Kowalnia” operating at the Sculpture Department of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. Using various means of expression resulting from the possibilities of new media, photography and video art, he creates his own world, documents fictional history, creates an artificial reality accentuating its unrealistic dimension. The fruits of this work are the works referred to by the artist himself as hybrids constructed of seemingly ordinary elements put together, evoke their distinct dissonance, thus proving the relativity of reality reception, its actual artificiality.
“The topic is not important: artificial war or crime, artificial tragedy (…) counterfeit east and sunset (…) I can create a monster and give it to people to be impressed or to reject it”
Similar actions are aimed at referring, in a critical way, to our reality, emphasizing its similarity to the fictional world created for the needs of the film, undermining the condition of key terms such as fiction and reality. Exposing in an ironic way the ridiculousness of rituals and behaviors, the absurdity of the present, filled with stereotypical phrases that grow into the rank of myths with icons, symbols devoid of content.
The premiere “Celebration of Erwin Koloczek” is another paradument in which the artist shows the world he created. In this case, however, the viewer from the beginning meets with a perceptible artificiality. The everyday life of the miners is contrasted with the unnatural pathos and affirmation emanating from their statements.
The film’s heroes associated with heavy, dangerous and poorly paid work are inconsistent with the issues they issue. Theoretically, they fit into the world presented, but they bring to it a certain unnaturalness, make the laconic underground reality “out of the question”, full of familiar phrases.
The exhibition will be held as part of the 5 Krakow Decades of Photography organized by the Museum of the History of Photography.
Hanna Wróblewska
www.mhf.krakow.pl
Jacek Malinowski, Erwin Koloczek and celebrities …
The celebration of Erwin Koloczek is another “paradocratic” film by Jacek Malinowski. A film in which the so-called ordinary people tell us about their ordinary or unusual life and the viewer actually to the end wonders where the boundary between fiction and truth runs, between the artistic creation and the almost photographic representation of reality. Sometimes you get caught in the most unlikely trap and believe that a woman with PDS (Pelvic Degeneration Syndrome) causing complete disappearance of the lower body really exists. The half-man in the story of his daily life is so convincingly ordinary. Doubts about the neurotic hero of the SSS are dispelled only by his final suicide in front of the camera, which ultimately shifts the boundaries from the document into fiction. An extraordinary couple: a sick and protector from Simulation to the very end, ie to ask an inquisitive artist with a camera from the apartment (and actually to throw it away), does not give us arguments to ultimately prejudge the matter. Especially that – as it turns out during the movie – the game, pretend, fiction is inscribed in the everyday life of this couple. The camera set in the apartment reveals that the girl only pretends to be ill, sunk in some kind of catatonia. The boy looks after her, not giving him a chance to change the situation, not wanting this change. So the viewer is accompanied by a sense of solving the riddle – does the girl pretend to be ill and this is life (how many such artistic films depicting strangers, others or sick have been created in the last dozen or so years!) Or a girl – actress – a sick person who plays the disease goes … etc
The ambiguity of fiction and life is compounded by perfectly chosen and convincing people playing, or actually “appearing” in films. Sometimes it is “naturszczycy”, sometimes young, yet “un-ganged” actors. And both speak to the camera with unusual naturalness mixed up with some, also natural, its lack, lack of familiarity with the camera. That is exactly how an everyman should behave – an “ordinary person”. Permanent – almost always – is the place of the artist and the camera. The artist is actually invisible, sometimes he is just a voice asking questions, a hand flashing in the frame and moving objects. He is the one who holds the camera, which – it seems to be dispassionately – records people confronting her. It is a kind of a mirror for them, in which they look.
In the latest film – The Celebration of Erwin Koloczek, however, something seems to be not so from the first minutes. People speaking to the camera – miners from the mine – give the impression of just as well chosen as the heroes of previous films. Original faces, dressed in working outfits, filmed together while working together. They say texts that match what they do. Sentences that describe their work, life, dreams. So why do not these sentences sound as natural as the half-woman or SSS boyfriend? Is it because Erwin Koloczek and his colleagues give them to the camera with too much bravado, in a slightly artificial way? Is the sense of the artist disappointing here? Or maybe it’s a matter of the text that matches and at the same time does not match the people who say it? Is the artist – a demiurge, as usual behind the camera, also decided to show himself as the creator of dialogues and hence their artificiality ??? Minutes pass and there is a certainty that we are participating in some game in which we must recognize our place and recognize the “opponent”. And only the last minutes give us – sometimes forbidden earlier – to solve this mystery. The celebration of Erwin Koloczek is also a document about celebrities …! Whoever they would have been …
About author
Jacek Malinowski (born 1964) works in various media: video, sculpture, photography, installation, recently the most focused on a film with the character of a fictitious document. He graduated from the Sculpture Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (1992), the International Summer Academy of Fine Arts in Salzburg, Austria (1993), Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, USA (1999).
Selected exhibitions: HalfAWoman, Mały Salon, Galeria Zachęta, Warsaw (2001); Praguebiennale 2, Prague, Czech Republic (2004); WRO – 11th. Multimedia Biennale, Wrocław (2004), HalfAWoman, Instituto Polacca di Rome, Italy (2005), POZA, Real Art Ways Hartford, USA (2006), Edvard-Munch-Haus, Warnemunde, Germany (2006).