As was previously mentioned, working closely with societies and finding importance there is one of the determining factors of our art. As Osborne said, art should go beyond the white-cube of institutional galleries. From an urbanist point of view, a "meaningless" non-space is still a space and still exists within the stratum of the city and the culture that inhabits it.
In regard to Osborne's arguments, where he criticises a singular place for art, we would be highly interested in what he would say about our actions. What we are doing is not just presenting art in a place or space, but we're hoping to change human behaviours and thoughts in that place by using art. We are hoping to cross boundaries and world divisions for the sake of a better society whilst, at the same time, giving art a certain autonomy. By combining the two, we think that art can change world views, laws and human behaviours. A good example of this is a piece of art we did called "Public-Not Public" which was relevant to Warsaw's green spaces that are often used as toilets, deterring people from using the green space as an area of recreation or aesthetic. The simple act of carefully placed lighting in and around the green space and beautifying the area deterred people from using it as a toilet, but it also turned the act of urinating up against a tree into urinating up against a piece of art. Art can also be transformative and, we would love to make the lighting a permanent feature of the green space. The area could then be used as an aesthetical and a recreational place, giving the space a renewed value. How should we describe this in the context of Osborne, where a site-specific display is not only aesthetic but also has an active function?
Art has a power that can change the world. Why shouldn't we use it to give a space more value and thus increase the net value of the city and the people? We believe that art is not an object attached to the artist, rather it is an expression of the artist. Artists, by their nature seek to impact an audience when they display their painting or their installation, why should we not go further and make the audience larger by affecting the city?
Before leaving this conversation we would like to pose a question about the nature of the relationship of your art with your audience. Do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decision-making process, in terms of what type of language is used in a particular context?
Before we even begin creating, we tend to treat the work as a collaborative effort, between the two of us as artists and the audience. The questions that arise are pretty uniform by now. What is the best way we can let people in on our art? and how do we make our intentions clear to the audience? People have a tendency to enjoy playing around with technology and this is why we choose things like Kinects and why we're learning more about the potential of the Oculus Rift. We add to our spaces things like artificial fog, analog lights and sounds of nature to set an atmosphere that is both immersive and compelling to the audience. It feels like we've mentioned the audience in almost all of our questions now and, at the risk of repeating ourselves, the audience is a very important thing for us. We want people to feel a connection with our work. To be able to relate to it and understand it on a deeper level. Our art is based on interaction so it much be accessible to everybody. We tend not to change the language too much to fit the context, it seems unimportant most of the time. If, however, a problem does arise, we usually look to change the art before we change our language. If the art is not intuitive enough that language is needed, we are not being as impactful or as interesting as we intend. Whilst we not afraid to take canonic ideas or truistic perceptions and present them in completely new, surprising or even shocking ways, we understand that there is a great risk of people misunderstanding or simply disregarding that kind of art and so context and understanding your viewer is crucially important when we consider these. We also understand the risks and the consequences, too, which make our initial background research necessary. Of course, context is important and we usually deal with that before the art has even been created by, as mentioned above, researching the place and understanding the space. From that, we usually gain enough insight to render context via complex language unneeded. Our art has to satisfy certain conditions, the audience must be handled correctly, the project must be intuitive and clear in its purpose whilst at the same time it must be saying something meaningful and important.
Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, preMADE. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?
We mostly keep our projects secret, we enjoy the element of pure surprise. It is very enriching during the exhibition. For future projects, we are realizing and weighing up a big land project involving an incredibly complex code and its interaction with lights. In the projects we'll be working on in the near future, we will be exploring the Ocullus Rift and the Microsoft Hololens as part of both a performance and site-specific installation in a different country (for now, we cannot say which country). More recently we have been looking into apps and gaming culture and seeing potential to further the interactive essence of our work. As we are great fans of tech, we would love to incorporate more gadgets like these, if time and resources permit.
That is just a small teaser of things to come. Thank you very much for giving us this opportunity!
lex code that is relevant to the interactive parts where we could use Kinects. The idea of creating bigger and bigger projects with these kinds of tools was, and is, always in our minds. Our first fully interactive project was presented as a part of our bachelor degree. It was the first time we showed this type of work to our professors, as well as our friends and family. It was a really valuable experience to see how people react to these type of things. We learnt a lot from it and it gave us more inspiration and means to explore interactive art further.
Dudorz:
Art was never an active part of my childhood, but I was a curious elds like fashion, music and merchandising…etc. And if it’s story about our life in the city, I always hop on to work on this project regardless of any creation form. Recently I’m preparing for really interesting project, so that people can interact with my art work more closely in the city. I will make more efforts to let people find this “urban noise’ everywhere in the city. This is going to performance. From this, I started to become involved with stage art and independent dance and theatre. Several directors have given me the time and space to experiment using multiple video projectors, and my work has become an active element onstage, sometimes interacting with the performers. Every project has been useful in some way for exploring and refining my ideas. Now in my capacity as film director, I'm able to call upon my experiences gained from working as a cross disciplinary artist.
Your artworks are revolving around the problem of social identity and cultural affiliations. Is there any particular way you would describe your identity as an artist but also as a human being in dynamically changing, unstable times? In particular, does your cultural substratum/identity form your aesthetics?
I belong to a minority group in society and that identity is always a part of me and my work. I don’t believe my artworks are changing due to unstable times but that I'm working my way through a theme and a method over time. The content of my work is becoming more and more personal and I think that is because I dare to be more honest with myself. What I find interesting to work with is in my immediate presence. When I collaborate with stageartists, we often focus on a current political theme. In these collaborations I work more as an art activist and have a broader openess for the aesthetics. My work is then more experimental with research on different ways to develop live presentations in the space.
Could you identify a specific artwork that has influenced your artistic practice or has impacted the way you think about race
and ethnic identity in visual culture?
“Revolted by the Thought of Known Places… Sweeney Astray” by Joan Jonas was one of the first performance installations that really made a huge impact on me. I was living in Paris during this time, in the early 90s, with a lot of influences from different cultures. It became the starting point of my own work. Joan Jonas practice has explored ways of seeing, the rhythms of ritual, and the authority of objects and gestures. Jonas continues to find new layers of meanings in themes and questions of gender and identity that have fueled her art for over thirty years. She is a great inspiration still today.
It is impossible to avoid the topic of body consciousness, embodied emotions and the image of body and personal identity that we see in your practice. What is the function of the identity appearing in your artworks – is it a canvas used to present your ideas or rather the subject of the art? What inspired you to use this as a theme in your practice?
I have been developing my visual imagery since I began studying art and film - from conceptual thinking, composition, using light and colour in different ways, through all the different techniques I've utilised over the years in my work and in my collaborations with stage artists such as dancers, musicians and actors. My approach is always developing through exploring these things. Visual imagery in essence is your way of experiencing what you see and transforming it. This is my world that I want to share and express through my art. The body consciousness, embodied emotions and the image of body and personal identity is part of this visual imagery, the emotional essence in my practice. Always present and always developing in different themes and projects.
Marina Abramovic stated: You see, what is my purpose of performance artist is to stage certain difficulties and stage the fear the primordial fear of pain, of dying, all of
which we have in our lives, and then stage them in front of audience and go through them and tell the audience, 'I'm your mirror; if I can do this in my life, you can do it in yours.'Can you relate anyhow to these words?
de-identify myself, by losing my roots, my culture, I would be very happy. Unfortunately the human being does'nt choose the place where he is born. He grows up in a society that automatically identifies, through education, culture, family... More than ever I think it's more important to go on a way of self-knowledge with the aim to meet “the other”.. This other without which we can not exist. It's the same for the artist. It is more important for me to be focused on my practice than to try to define it according to esthetic criteria of identification. It's probably the reason i like to remember the painter Matisse who said or wrote that an artist must never be prisoner of himself, prisoner of a style, prisoner of a reputation.
Would you like to tell us something about your background? Could you talk a little about experiences that has influence the way you currently relate yourself to your artworks?
All my way is influenced by encounterings.
It began by the meeting with my professor of literature at school. More than giving French or Literature classes, she brought us to discover texts, movies, plays, visual artworks and to think about on what we saw or read.. Thanks to her that I met Pierre Vincke, a theatredirector who was worjink in the tradition of Grotowski ... Both of them have led me to go to theater school. In this school I had meetings. Meetings with artists but also and especially human beings that made me discover. I always need o discover rather than to master a practice. It's probably the reason my encounter with Monica Klingler and Boris Nieslony was decisive for me and led me on the path of Performance Art which is a form still difficult to define. Each performance artist has a different definition of what it is...
Could you identify a specific artwork that has influenced your artistic practice or has impacted the way you think about race and ethnic identity in visual culture?
No I don't have a specific artwork that has influenced my artistic practise but many.
I'm influenced by some philsophers as well as poets or musicians or dancers or visual artists but also by some places or landscapes or atmospheres ... For some years, I was used for example to go to India where I was used to follow some traditionnal muscians or to learn bharatanatyam and practice vipassana meditation... Of course this experience has impacted my art work.... This brought me to think and work differently... My experience in India brought me to discover traditionnal strong art and paradoxally to the way of Performance Art. But there I see one common point: to make no separation between art and life and to be here and now, without projection on the future.
It's difficult for me to speak about race and ethnic identity. But I can say that today we miss more and more this notion of “to be here and now” which is more present in some cultures ... By practising Performance Art, it's my way to be connected to this way of thinking. And even in this field actually it's more and more difficult. The society and the art world brings us more and more to plan in advance, to define our work, more than to do. Just to do. To do what we deeply need.
And of course, my encountering with Black Market International and later the notion of Open Source or Open session via PAErsche have also a big impact on my work. When we go on that, each of us perform by sharing time and space but without trying to convince each other on some common way. This is for me a wonderfull way how we can meet each other, regardless of our origin, our race or our “identity”...
Many of your works carry an autobiographical message. Since you transform your experiences into your artwork, we are curious, what is the role of memory in your artistic productions? We are particularly interested if you try to achieve a faithful translation of your previous experiences or if you rather use memory as starting point to create.
My memory is clearly a starting point to create. I don't have any autobiographical message. I use my personnal experience ( what I feel , what I see, what I learn, what I ear...) to work. It's a motor or a material. I'm not able to paint, so I can't do something with red or white or yellow or black colors. All I have is life, a body alive. And I need to do something with that...
My sensation about life sometimes is too intense then I need to transform this intensity in some action. Some artistic action... If people can take something from this action this is great... but I don't want to give them “a specific message” or to control the translation of my experience.