Wyspa Institute of Art – Alternativa Contemporary Visual Arts Festival 2010-2012

It is dark. It is cold. And it is late. In the critical space of the Gdansk Shipyard, Alternativa Contemporary Visual Arts Festival 2010-2012 – a new project by Wyspa Institute of Art – commences its two-year journey.
Alternativa will launch its programme of exhibitions at the end of May 2011 and the programme will culminate in June-September 2012.
Alternativa Housewarming, planned for December 3-5, is a three-day pilot that publicly unveils Hall 90B, an industrial building across the street from Wyspa which will be a key location for Alternativa exhibitions and events in 2011-12.

Programme

December 3, 8-10pm
Building 90B
Under the leading title Secrets and Lies, Alternativa unveils its space for just one night on December 3rd. It does so without flourish or fanfare, but unfolds eventfully into the cold, dark night.
Loosely relating to the movie by Mike Leigh and its main character, an optometrician, the event makes possible, as well as delimits, our visual perception and causes us to reflect on the political repercussions of that. Although born in a space, Secrets and Lies is to be sensed as choreography and events in time. In the dark, something will be happening and there will be some light too. The immediate surroundings are uncertain, just as the future of the Shipyard is uncertain, bonds shattered and representations appriopriated. Small groups will enter the space.  In 30 minutes, our understanding of space and time and the possibility of representing it through art will shift.
Artists: Angelika Fojtuch | Elzbieta Jabłońska | Grzegorz Klaman | Kasia Krakowiak| Anna Molska |Dominika Skutnik | Ślina (Roman Dziadkiewicz and Łukasz Jastrubczak) | Mariusz Waras.

December 4
Wyspa
Critical Malfunction
In Linda Pollack’s hospitable Habeas Lounge, a group of Alternativa curators and invited guests will take part in a barcamp event about the denied aspects of cultural production as proposed by curator Kuba Szreder. All critical practitioners, devoted to tweaking mechanisms of art making, have encountered on their paths many systemic failures, made individual mistakes, and\or discovered problems irresolvable from their current position. The systemic failures or personal mistakes are evidence of critical malfunctions of cultural production, the noises made by social machines when they are cracked, hacked, overheated. Confirmed participants include Karen Ibrahim (Critical Practice) |Marsha Bradfield (Critical Practice) | Metod Blejec (Critical Practice) |Michał Herer| Ola Hirszfeld |Heimo Lattner | Martin Kaltwasser | Viviana Checchia |Tanja Purebic (Radical Educational Collective) and Pola Dwurnik.

Pecha Kucha Night vol 7
Organized by Lowbudget – design collective from Gdansk
Chicago Boys: while we were singing they were dreaming…
An evening of music played by a 70s revival band and neo-liberalism study group assembled by Hiwa K.  The band plays popular music from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, England, Bangladesh, Poland and Lebanon in the 1970s, followed by presentations from archives relating to personal memories and neo-liberal policies.
Cihat Arinc| Janna Graham | Hiwa K | Helene Kazan | Amal Khalaf | Roshi Nasehi | Abbas Nokhasteh | Shimon Sakakibara | Lawrence Abu Hamdan will be joined by Clinton Heneke and local musicians, presenters and enthusiasts.

December 5
Wyspa
Postulating the Postulates: a part of My Daily Constitution project by Linda Pollack.
On the fringe of the exhibition Re-designing the East/ Political Designers, Linda Pollack invites artists, curators of the project and guests to revisit the famous 21 demands of the 1980 Gdansk Shipyard strike that brought to life one of the most interesting social moments in Europe – Solidarnosc. Confirmed participants are Oliver Ressler, Linda Pollack and Grzegorz Klaman.
During the Alternativa Housewarming events, the exhibitions “Political Designers” curated by Maks Bochenek and “Democracies” by Artur Żmijewski at Wyspa, and “Selection” by Dorota Nieznalska at Modelarnia, will be open until 11 pm.
Also, the first book in the Alternativa Editions Series  titled “Grzegorz Klaman” will be available in the Wyspa bookstore.
Alternativa is an initiative of the Wyspa Institute of Art under the artistic directorship of Aneta Szylak. It operates in collaboration with the City of Gdansk, Gdansk 2016 Office and is supported by Municipality of Gdansk, European Union.

Wyspa Institute of Art
Alternativa Housewarming
December 3-5, 2010
www.wyspa.art.pl 
www.alternativa.org.pl 

Artistic Director: Aneta Szylak
Gdansk, Doki 1/145B, 102B, 90B

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