Sheep & Bunny EN
Sheep and Bunny
sculpture
curator: Sumesh Sharma
Clark House Initiative, Bombaj, marzec 2015
in cooperation with Polish Institute New Delhi
Dust, forms layers of archaeological interest when it collects within grime and paint over furniture, damp corners of walls, statues and other agents that bring to rest particles of our skin, eroding soil and stone, hair and general minute detritus. Finer particles interlace with hair and other available fibres such as spider webs to create shapes that are furry, light and airborne. Animal associations are often made with these shapes, the Poles prefer to call them cats, the French prefer to associate it with wool and call the collected balls of dust ?sheep?, and in English they are called ?dust bunnies?.
In the lanes that descend into tunnels of metal worker shops from Falkland Road there is a certain change in the quality of soil, years of oils, acids, ferrous particles, brass ingots have been paved into the surface, burnt coal and sand gather on the walls and the skin of the workers, at times the road-dust that collects is painted over creating sculptural textures, that are coarse when viewed smooth when touched, much like the anomaly of a ?Dust Bunny? ? something that sounds endearing but has a revolting constitution. Katarzyna Krakowiak collects dust produced by the people of Bombay and has gathered in its architecture for her project at Clark House Initiative.
A series of bronze scupltures is the only such project in the artistic activity of Katarzyna Krakowiak.
Best to the Best EN
Best to the Best
sound sculpture and a week-long performance
TIFA Working Studios, Pune, India, February 2015
Best to the Best is a week-long, construction performance and a concert, collecting sounds of construction equipment as well as other equipment used by a developer outside a historic building, where a supermarket was being built at the time.
The sculpture produced for the TIFA at its space emerged as a result of working with students of architecture from Pune, India. In the course of their studies, they learn how to construct with the use of traditional methods, but only theoretically. Testing their knowledge in practice for the first time, they played a week-long concert built from noises of tools used for matter formation. The very act of earth compaction by hand with the help of traditional construction equipment became a ritual trance. A visual-sound performance emerged, in a micro-room installed in a pre-existing room ? viewers could observe the builders only from one side, while hearing them throughout the entire space and beyond, as the acoustics of the rooms additionally amplified the sound of the manual activity within.
An intentional erecting of a mud structure, built with the use of traditional, regional techniques, as an obstacle to the building entrance, questioned fundamental concepts of what space and architecture can offer. The work rejected conceptions of space as a purely visual dimension, and approached sound as an extension of a sensual experience of architecture. The act of performed labour connected the significance of the interior and the exterior. Sound and movement of physical labourers filled the previously empty space, creating a claustrophobic sensation, but they also symbolically opened up a dialogue, staging an act of territorial menace.
An additional element of the collaboration with students from Pune was evening seminars, lectures and knowledge exchanges on understanding architecture prepared by the artist.
Out of tune EN
Out of tune
sound sculpture
curator: Matthias Böttger
acoustic cooperation: Ralf Meinz
Polish Institute in Berlin, June 2015
The piece was predicated upon using a musical language to describe architecture. In Out of tune, musical dissonance, false notes were employed to explicate contemporary architecture in terms of distortion, falsity, unmelodiousness, singing in one breath.
Out-of-tune architecture is an interpretation of Rem Koolhaas? concept of Junkspace. He describes seamless architecture, flooding and building our cities. The process of filling every space with provisional structure is a side effect of modernisation, which disorients and consumes the landscape.
Here, Junkspace is not only a material, but also an audial substance of architecture, and the American theorist?s conception becomes translated into an acoustic experience. It transpires in space in a process of superimposition of two melodic lines: a birdsong and the artist?s singing. Drowned-out organisms would strive to sing louder, owing to which their statements lose their melodic line, become incomprehensible and shed their communicative function.
The process of mutual tuning of both statements becomes visualised, and the installation displays test print-outs, helpful in a correct system coordinates setting in 3D printers. The abstract patterns are a notation of axes, determining positions in space and tuning objects and their surroundings.
Architecture is understood here as harmonisation, and a detuning of architecture reflects the loss of ease of communication in present-day world.
As If Nothing Could Fall except the Sun
As If Nothing Could Fall except the Sun
installation
part of the exhibition Architecture is the Music of Space. Five Exceptional Concert Halls in Europe
curator: Ewa P. Porębska
The Mieczysław Karłowicz Philharmonic Hall in Szczecin, 23 June?10 September 2016
instalments in: Blaibach, Reykjavik, Oslo and Porto, under preparation
“As If Nothing Could Fall except the Sun” is the first composition of series Architecture is the Music of Space. The alarm concert dedicated to the Sun.
The installation was produced for an exhibition exploring the influence of architecture on music, translatability and untranslatability of the two sensual experiences, and a transcendence of their forms on the example of five, contemporarily erected concert calls (Szczecin, Blaibach, Reykjavik, Oslo, Porto).
“As If Nothing Could Fall except the Sun” was composed of a video projected at the central point of the hall, representing a golden plate in a state of physical change and its afterglows, and a musical composition resonating throughout the entire building, as performed by its permanently fixed evacuation system (the composition has also become a permanent fixture of a repertoire of sounds available in the system). The piece was made up of technical sounds of the philharmonic, e.g., sounds of intermissions between pieces, action withheld by certain instruments in concert performances, suspended playing on instruments, breaths, air flows. Their selection and juxtaposition reveal, for example, the shape and size of the very building, submit the eponymous Sun and particular elements of the architecture to relationships, e.g.: a temperature of the musical motif of sunrise is correlated with an ascension rhythm of the staircase leading to the concert room in the hall. Further, the artist recorded a 23-second-long album, containing 8 short pieces, and three of those have been chosen in an internet poll to be used as concert announcing ring-tones.
An immediate inspiration has come from the building, whose minimalist form sets it within the tradition of a neo-Gothic architecture of its street: with a white exterior, general-access, light-filled space, and the concert hall itself: laid in gold, where individual plates, making up the entire decoration, were assembled by hand. The dazzling structure and its afterglows, provoked by reflected sunlight, and the gold space, giving off an impression of heat, with an extremely arresting wall texture, achieved thanks to the golden plates, fifteen by fifteen centimetres large, led the artist, usually working at the meeting ground of conceptualism and sensualism, to a decidedly sensual treatment of this invitation. The resultant composition has been dedicated to the Sun, while an enlightenment and changes in state of matter caused by operation of heated air are its leading motifs.
The installation was produced for an exhibition exploring the influence of architecture on music, translatability and untranslatability of the two sensual experiences, and a transcendence of their forms on the example of five, contemporarily erected concert calls (Szczecin, Blaibach, Reykjavik, Oslo, Porto). The piece was made in response to an invitation from the Szczecin Philharmonic on the occasion of an architectural award (European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture ? Mies van der Rohe Award) for its new seat designed by Estudio Barozzi Veiga.
House of Dust by Alison Knowles EN
House of Dust by Alison Knowles
sound sculpture
part of the The House of Dust by Alison Knowles exhibition
curators: Katherine Carl, Maud Jacquin and Sébastien Pluot
The James Gallery, New York, 7 September?29 October 2016
Cneai, Paris, 9 September-19 November 2017
The sound sculpture, Oh no, please don’t, belonged to a multi-part project (comprising an exhibition, a performative action, a course for students and a publication) dedicated to Alison Knowles, a classic of conceptual art, and her pioneering, precocious work, The House of Dust (1967). A computerised poem and a documentation of subsequent structures built on the poem’s basis (an action, a discussion, publications) were exhibited in a dialogue with works ? primarily from Knowles’ own oeuvre as well as by other Fluxus artists ? exploring relations between art, technology and architecture. In addition, the visionary, yet contemporarily undervalued, realisation became an inspiration for producing new pieces and spatial interpretations, especially for the exhibition, in resonance with The House of Dust.
Knowles’ The House of Dust is one of the earliest instances of computer poetry. The structure of subsequent quatrains, written in Fortran, is two-part. Each consists of the phrase, ?a house of?, and of a random sequence generated from four sources and pertaining to either material, or the location of the eponymous house, or some situation, a manner of light falling, for example, or residents of the house. In 1968, the computer generated piece ? a classic of conceptual art ? became translated into matter, owing to the Guggenheim scholarship the artist received to erect a house in Chelsea (a district of New York). After a period, the materialised poem was deconstructed, secured and transported to Cal Arts Burbank, California, where Knowles lived in 1970-72. The artist used the house as a venue for her student classes. She also hosted other artists in the house, who entered into relationships with its open structure.
Oh no, please don’t is a concrete music concert based on a sonification of phrases from The House of Duse, emitted into public space of the loud Fifth Avenue. The composition relied on a threshold of subliminal frequencies and made use of fragments of universally recognisable sound signals of electronic communicators, refracting a pre-existing audio sphere, but acting at the limit of perceptibility, since it was filtered through the gallery glass windows, from behind which it was emitted.
The House of Dust exhibition artists were: Alison Knowles and Ay-o, Chloë Bass, Keren Benbenisty, Jérémie Bennequin, George Brecht, Hugo Brégeau, Marcel Broodthaers, John Cage, Alejandro Cesarco, Jagna Ciuchta, Constant, Jean-Pascal Flavien, Yona Friedman, Mark Geffriaud, Beatrice Gibson, Eugen Gomringer, Dan Graham, Jeff Guess, Geoffrey Hendricks, Dick Higgins, Maria Hup_eld, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Norman C. Kaplan, Allan Kaprow, Frederick Kiesler, Nicholas Knight, Katarzyna Krakowiak, Mikko Kuorinki, Theo Lutz, Stephane Mallarmé, Alan Michelson, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Jenny Perlin, Nina Safainia, Carolee Schneeman, Mieko Shiomi, James Tenney, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss and Emmett Williams.
Tomorrow will never come
Tomorrow will never come
installation in cooperation with Mirosław Bałka
curator: Marek Wasilewski
The Arsenal Municipal Gallery, Poznań, April 2017
Gdańsk City Gallery, Gdańsk, January 2017
The Arsenal Gallery in Białystok, November 2017
A light-sound composition engaging architecture and pre-existing elements of a gallery. A series of poetic slogans (single words, series of letters and signs) was produced in the technique of neon lamp and synchronised to sound of two subwoofers situated opposite one another, producing a pure tone at 42mHz frequency, cancelling one other out, and leading ? uncontrollably ? to occasional silences.
A starting point to the piece was a question about a sense of insecurity in an increasingly rapidly changing world; about a possibility of articulation of our desires and fears; the universally felt inflation of verbal signification in the public space; about aggression, demagogy and falsity of media and political discourses; slogans that are instruments of verbal bullying and domination by means of symbolic violence they carry; about linguistic and sign manipulations of emotions and needs.
The work was a question as to the meaning of words and signs with which we communicate, but not understand. The title of the exhibition suggested an impossibility of any further narrative, an impossibility of fulfilment of the future at the point of erasing the present. It also contains the paradox of impossibility of time determination: ?tomorrow? never comes, since from our point of view, every moment must be defined as a present moment, which results in an impossibility of both transgression and transcendence. Paradoxes related to imagining the future have been best captured by Richard Bardbrook, the author of Imaginary Futures (2009), in giving telling titles to its chapters: ?The future is what it used to be? and ?Those who forget the future are condemned to repeat it?. Barbrook demonstrated that the future is not a function of the past, but rather that imaginings of tomorrow are a theoretical, political and propaganda construct which has no chance of being fulfilled in reality to the extent to which we expect it.
As essential element of the exhibition was a process which lead to its emergence: a dialogue of artists and their search for a common ground, which would not be a compromise, but an opening of new possibilities. The effect was based in cooperation, negotiations and a pursuit of a novel quality, which would form a new constellation of significations. The exhibition yields at least a threefold reading: as a chaotic polyphony of voices, as a monologue, or as a dialogue. Its simple form opened the viewer up to a possibility of self-propelled navigation between signals and a novel construction of meanings.
[description based on a curatorial text]
The Rise and Fall of Air
The Rise and Fall of Air
exhibition
curator: Michał Libera
cooperation: Joanna Waśko
acoustics: Ralf Meinz, Andrzej Kłosak
The Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, 2 July?18 August 2013
The Rise and Fall of Air is an exhibition comprising 13 display rooms of the Zachęta, and a sequel to Making the walls quake as if they were dilating with the secret knowledge of great powers, recipient of a Special Mention at the at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale.
Whereas the Venice Pavilion served as a sound-transmitting structure, the building of the Zachęta became a construction which absorbs sounds. Both were, however, approached holistically, providing a material for sculptures and determining the scale of the interventions. The very interventions, in turn, became an integral element of architecture: their presence persists and unfolds in real time.
At the Zachęta, the artist?s attention was concentrated around an enormous system of wastes, described by architectural plans as ?voids ? technical rooms?. These are tight and inaccessible openings between walls, unused elevator shafts and staircases, as well as an entire floor of skylights. In these invisible spaces, inaccessible to the visitors, Krakowiak?s sculpture was situated ? unobservable by the eye, made entirely of sound.
In a situation of working with inaccessible spaces, such a choice was most natural: nothing else but sound can, after all, reach the place the sculpture has been injected, a sound which does not travel any further.
[description based on a curatorial text]
Photos: Krzysztof Pijarski
The Whisper of Those Things Isn?t Real
The Whisper of Those Things Isn?t True
performance
Xawery Dunikowski Museum of Sculpture, Królikarnia Palace, Warsaw, 24 September 2017
Using a diamond, set upside down in my ring, I would cut out with my fist a scratch on 22 windows walking through the the exhibition space at the Krolikarnia. A scratch will be recorded in real time and played back amplified through the speakers outside of the building of Królikarnia. The sound of scratch will go in circles, following the architectural structure of the building. By making a scratch in the glass I will also open the inner space and connect the interior of the gallery with the Park outside. A snap between the invisible and nonphysical defines the essence of this transparency.
Architecture is transparency.
Sound built architecture acoustically divides world into the outer and inner space, while transparency of the glass, makes it visually all connected in one: interior of the building with park, park with the interior.
The sound helps us to discern the seclusion of these worlds.
Translucent surface of the glass/window becomes diaphragm / filter through which the spaces converse with each other. And images from afar come closer and overlap framed by the structure of the window. This way, window becomes a barrier/soundcatcher and a speaker simultaneously.
The whole building is created visually with the landscape piercing through it. It?s a composition and performance which sets the horizon for this building and for its connection to the external landscape.
This interpenetration of acoustic environments creates a new dimension of acoustic transparency.
Part of Warsaw Gallery Weekend 2017.
Special thanks to:
sound designer: Ralf Meinz
jeweller: Bogdan Zgódka
sound engineer: Craftman
photos: Bartek Górka
Dust
Dust
sound sculpture
Halle am Berghain, Berlin, 18 May-03 June 2018
curator: Carsten Seifarth
organiser: singuhr ? projekte
sponsor: Hauptstadtkulturfonds
The installation ?DUST? by Polish artist Katarzyna Krakowiak in the Halle am Berghain combines architecture, sound and light to create a situation. The monumental hall of the former co-generation power plant with its massive concrete architecture serves simultaneously as a backdrop and friction area for this site-specific installation.
?Dust is not dirt?, Krakowiak says. ?Dust is a distortion. Dust is uncountable, it only steals shapes from other objects. It reproduces; it copies. Formally it belongs to the past, but I am interested in its temporary existence, a transitory shape in a temporary exhibition. (…) My work will adapt to the existing architecture, and will be a consequence of it.?
Krakowiak turns the entire building into a 24-channel sound structure. This sound structure is built with vocal sounds that are broken by the architecture. By using her own voice Krakowiak makes a female voice signature that is confronted with the brutalism of the Berghain architecture. This structure forms a temporary condensation of sounds, which settle on the architecture like dust. In her moving sound clusters, Krakowiak combines sound elements typical of this space by using a sound already existing in the building, that seems to be dripping through its walls with the new vocal signatures and thus opens new areas of perception for the visitors.
Photos: Roman März
Rozcięty na wysokość nieba EN
Cut at the Level of the Sky
action and drawing
as a part of an exhibition “Plac Małachowskiego 3”
curator: Magdalena Komornicka
Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, 28 June 2018
Katarzyna Krakowiak?s work consists of a performative drawing ? a recording of an eight-hour operation on the façade of the Zachęta building. It was created as a result of gradual, methodical cleaning, washing of the walls of the gallery and revealing the architecture. The material was the dust accumulated on the façade, while water was the tool. The drawing, left exposed to dirty air during the exhibition, will gain and lose successive layers deposited and washed away by atmospheric factors.
The gesture, activity and movement itself, as well as the further life of the drawing, were important in the artist?s action, inspired by the history of Zachęta as a cultural institution and the architectural changes of the building.
The drawing is visible on the base of the façade from Królewska Street, as well as on the façade of Zachęta.
