17 Mar 2011

Accretions II at Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz

Accretions II

Curated by: Angela Harutyunyan, Tevž Logar, Joanna Sokołowska
Artists: Roman Dziadkiewicz, Hassan Khan, Siniša Labrović, Shady El Noshokaty

The word 'accretion' refers to expansive growth and build-up of biological organisms. The curators of the Accretions exhibition have appropriated the word as an operational term both to question and to intervene into the modes of public engagement with specific artistic positions.

The Accretions II exhibition in Å?ódź was preceded by a collaboration between curators and artists (Roman Dziadkiewicz, Shady El Noshokaty, Hassan Khan, SiniÅ¡a Labrović and Honza Zamojski) in a show in Ljubljana, in August 2010. The Accretions project in Ljubljana was an attempt to respond to specific institutional policies of the Galerija Å kuc, and particularly, to its agenda of reconstituting the gallery as a social space that reflects both exhibition strategies and models of artistic and curatorial collaboration. Taking up its title as a structural proposition rather than an overarching thematic framework, the Accretions exhibition consisted of a series of public events which created 'work in focus' situations. During daily meetings with the audience, each artist presented a work or did a performance, leaving traces, supplements or new works in the gallery. The exhibition was thus materialized gradually through accumulation of works. This format allowed for intimate and focused engagement with one work of a single artist at a time.
An important motive for our collaboration was the desire to search for transnational trajectories of conceiving aesthetic communities, which would transverse predetermined modes of global connectivity while denying expectations to represent cultural and geographical identities.
The next venue to further the collaboration is the Muzeum Sztuki in Å?ódź, where we focus on the question of articulating knowledge in the aesthetic processes.

The knowledge we refer to is inscribed both immanently in the discourse of art, and in its social framework. In Accretions II, we put forward the following questions: How can knowledge be produced, translated, communicated, or obscured in art? How does the circulation of knowledge between intentions, projections of the artist, works of art, participants in artistic projects and a broader audience develop? To what extent is knowledge of art or knowledge gained through art conceived through processes of accretion, accumulation, growth, friction and exchange? Is there in art a state of excess that does not submit to analysis? How does one evoke a sense of the unthinkable, the ineffable and the untranslatable in art? What role is played by a ruptures or a silence in communicating knowledge?

Accretions II has a dual function: on the one hand it is an exhibition that confronts the audience with works by four artists (Roman Dziadkiewicz, Hassan Khan, Siniša Labrović, Shady El Noshokaty); on the other, it is a temporary venue for workshops and performative activities involving students from the Academy of Fine Arts, as well as other participants.

The exhibition is prepared in cooperation with the Galerija Å kuc in Ljubljana