The exhibition is open until 30.10.2013
The future is exercised in Alicja Karska and Aleksandra Went’s most recent work, a video installation titled Flying by Foot (2013). Comprising several black-and-white video channels, the installation shows pilots performing exercises ahead of an aerobatics show. ‘Flying by foot’, that is, memorising and practicing the exact sequences of movements and gestures they will perform in the air, the pilots travel ahead in time, as it were. The footage is a visual testimony of that which is yet to happen.
Working together since 2002, Karska and Went are authors of installations, photographic series, artist’s books, videos and films. In numerous works they deal with the issue of memory and with forgotten or ignored aspects of culture, documenting vanishing areas of contemporary visuality, cultural phenomena from the fringes of urban spaces and the peripheries of imagination. In their dialogue with memory and the past, Karska and Went avoid historical narration, preferring instead to explore images of latent or ignored memory. It is also toward the past that they turn in their most recent project, Franciszek Duszeńko: Monuments, devoted to the late outstanding sculptor, Franciszek Duszeńko (1925-2008). Meant to revive memory in a dialogue with the present rather than to commemorate, the installation shows models of Duszeńko’s little-known sculptures displayed inside maquettes imitating various exhibition spaces.
The sketch-like, modernist forms come from the artist’s Gdańsk studio which proved a major artistic discovery following the artist’s death. Duszeńko, a highly valued pedagogue and co-founder of the Gdańsk Academy of Fine Arts’ Faculty of Sculpture, is best known for his monumental work while his small-scale sculptures and sketches never left the studio. Karska & Went, themselves students of Duszeńko’s students, place the small forms inside models of fictional exhibition spaces, built into boxes that can be rearranged and transported at will. Transferring Duszeńko’s filigree objects from the private space of the studio to staged public spaces, the duo inscribe both in contemporary art-historical narratives. In this way, Karska and Went raise questions about the place of the sculptor’s works in contemporary culture, the role of museums, and the methods of keeping memory alive.
Alicja Karska (born 1978) and Aleksandra Went (born 1976) have been working together since their studies at the Gdańsk Academy of Fine Arts. Their solo exhibitions have been shown at venues such as the CCA Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw (2003); Galeria Le Guern, Warsaw (2005); Galeria Miejska Arsenał, Poznań (2006, 2012); La Monnaie, Brussels (2007); Artists House, Tel Aviv (2009); Profile Foundation, Warsaw (2009, 2011, 2013), Gdańska Galeria Miejska, Gdańsk (2010); Galeria BWA, Katowice (2010); Galeria BWA, Olsztyn (2011); or Labirynt Gallery, Lublin (2012).
