Unearthing Delights
5th edition of NARRACJE – Installations and Interventions in Public Space 2013
Curated by Rob Garett
Gdansk, Poland
15-17 November 2013
Exhibition webpage
Narracje webpage
Unearthing Delights / Odkrywanie zachwyca
Markets, Memories and Meetings / Targowiska, spotkania, wspomnienia
5th edition of NARRACJE – Installations and Interventions in Public Space
15-17 November 2013
Długie Ogrody / Long Gardens, Gdańsk, Poland
Rob Garrett, Curator
ORGANISER: Instytut Kultury Miejskiej / City Culture Institute
CO-ORGANISER: Gdańskiej Galerii Miejskiej / Gdansk City Gallery
THEME:
By the end of the 17th century Długie Ogrody was only partially occupied and developed; and to this day it has remained as a district without name, intensive development, or a unified character. For the past 200 years it has been a field of possibilities. It does not impose a single style, or any particular aesthetic upon visitors. It is attractive for our Narracje project specifically because it is “un-made.” It is the perfect meeting place for things strangely familiar and uncommonly strange.
In the spirit of that legacy “Unearthing Delights” has invited artists to create projects that engage with the markets, gardens and communities of the former district of Długie Ogrody. Drawing on the historic fabric of the area and on aspects of the current situation, artists will offer responses, both poetic and critically engaged, with scent, sound, light, moving image, story-telling, sculptural installation and community participation.
Narracje’s art projects and local initiatives will set the scene for visitors to consider their own relation to various strands of the area’s multiple pasts; and to consider how these insights expand the life of the imagination and suggest new identities, social forms and public relations.
ARTISTS:
Manon Awst & Benjamin Walther (DE), Gregory Bennett (NZ), Aleksandra Ciapka & Filip Ignatowicz (PL), Tomasz Domanski (PL), Justyna Gruszczyk (PL), Alexandra Guillot (FR), Rebecca Ann Hobbs (NZ), Anastasia Klose (AU), Jakub Knera (PL), Paweł Kowzan (PL), Anna Królikiewicz (PL), Juliette Laird (NZ), Katarzyna Malejka & Tomek Wlaźlak (PL), Eglė Rakauskaitė (LT), Rachael Rakena (NZ), Judy Rifka (US) & Daniel Dibble (UK), Kasia Swinarska & Grazyna Rigall (PL), Ines Tartler (DE), Where Dogs Run: Alexey Korzukhin, Natalia Grekhova, Vlad Bulatov and Olga Inozemtseva (RU).
Gregory Bennett (NZ)
“Apokalypolis I” 2013
HD video and audio
10 minutes (looped)
“Apokalypolis I” continues my exploration of intricately constructed virtual worlds populated by multitudes of de-individualized moving figures trapped in a form of uncanny life; bodies enacting a series of seemingly endless cryptic cyclic rituals, existing in a marginal state, neither dead or undead.
This work, conceived for projection onto an existing architectural setting, serves as a staging ground for a variety of both passive and active interactions between the figures and their often unstable or rapidly metamorphosing geographic and architectural settings. This is a world in constant flux, where time and space are ambiguous factors, and where elements are in state of persistent ‘becoming’, a state of both revealing and retreating.
3D animation software is utilized to order to realize these works, drawing on a range of representational traditions and influences from both art historical, moving image and popular culture sources where the multiplied body forms the primary subject.
Bennett’s animations use the synchronised movements of human forms en masse, running, stepping, bending, to create something akin to a corporeal architecture that is in perpetual flux. While they move over and around both utopian and dystopian built forms, the figures’ similarities of form, colour and gesture seem to constitute a structure all of its own which transforms space.
When this mass moves it does so as if with one mind, but it is not an automaton, it is a networked mind. They are colony-like; moving as individuals but seeming to share common purposes
