The Foksal Gallery Foundation has been founded in 1997
with the aim of protecting the heritage of the Foksal Gallery, founded
in 1966. Its activities - carrying out artists? projects, publishing
and scientific activity - has soon greatly expanded and become more
autonomous. This is because protecting the history of the Foksal
Gallery, which has since the mid-60s been creating both a progressive
artistic movement as well as its own tradition, requires an active
approach. It can only be done by constantly updating history and
confronting it with the present situation and young artists?
ideas. It also involves a creative approach - characteristic for
the Foksal tradition - to the very structure of the institution?s
functioning and seeking ways for a possibly most direct interaction
with artists. This constant tension between history and new challenges,
ideas, and the possibilities for their realisation has led in December
2001 to the opening of a new location, and a spatial separation,
after 38 years of staying together at the same address, of the Foksal
Gallery and the Foundation. One of the Foundation?s goals remains
the co-operation with the Foksal Gallery, meant both materially
(precious archives and collection) as well as ideally (a mythologised
theoretical entity). On the other hand, the Foksal Gallery Foundation
is an organisation interested in history only to the extent that
it can be used today.
We would like to present the Foksal
Gallery Foundation's
activities in several thematic blocks:
playing with history
A presentation of projects that were
a confrontation of artistic attitudes fundamental for the Foksal
tradition with its present situation, as well as those which were
inspired by a living tradition.?Creeping Revolution? (1999), for
instance, is an exhibition featuring Foksal Gallery co-founders
Edward Krasi?ki and Andrzej Szewczyk, and young generation artists
Jim Lambie and Richard Wright. The project was an attempt to analyse
the updates of some conceptual art strategies in the 90s, as well
as an attempt to suspend the gallery?s repertoire concept: the project
was running for eight months in the gallery without its history
being interrupted.
Also, the Foksal Gallery?s performance in
the Zach?a Gallery called ?Is Better to Know...? (2000) with the
participation of Miroslaw Balka, Douglas Gordon, and Pawel Althamer,
as well as an exhibition inspired by the prose of Robert Walser,
called ?Walk to the End of the World? (2001).
materials: slides
playing with the Gallery
Transgressing the gallery as a place,
a set of functions and prejudices, was a subject of the work of
many artists working recently in the Foksal Gallery, including,
among others, Tom Friedman, Wilhelm Sasnal, or Georg Schneider.
One of the most spectacular were Pawel Althamer?s projects, who
at his first exhibition (1996) proposed to treat the gallery as
a preparation room for going out (through a window) into the real
world of a garden beyond. At the next one (1999), he left the gallery
empty while covering its courtyard and a park beyond with a huge
(400m2) tent which replaced the exhibition space, and served as
a frame put upon an existing thing, thus reversing the usual gallery
situation.
materials: slides
playing with the city
The Foksal Gallery Foundation has carried
out in recent years several public projects which represented an
attempt to expand outwards and confront laboratory-produced ideas
with the living tissue of the city. A consequence of the experiences
gained during the carrying out of these projects was, among other
things, the decision to open the Foundation?s new location, which,
unlike a typical white cube gallery, is a space that is even architecturally
open to the chaos of the city centre outside. We will present the
following projects: Brodno 2000, carried out by Pawel Althamer in
a Warsaw housing project neighbourhood, and a mosaic designed in
the centre of the city by Piotr Uklanski.
materials: slides,
video documentation of the Br?no 2000 project
playing with the institution
Projects carried out as part of the
Foundation?s activities are often self-centred,representing an attempt
to define its condition and capacities, to transgress the situation.
Consequently, these projects cause the institution to subsequently
suspend some kinds of activities, and take up new ones. We will
present an exhibition entitled ?Bureaucracy? which was an attempt
to describe an the institutional crisis the Foundation and the Foksal
Gallery found themselves in mid-2001. Piotr Uklanski's photography
entitled?Foksal Gallery? shows artists and critics of several generations
associated with Foksal in 2001, at a breakthrough moment, just before
the separation of the Gallery and the Foundation. Santiago Sierra?s
project (2002) concerns the perception of the Foksal place in a
wider social context. The artist proposed to hire an illegal immigrant
from Russia - a sign of the country?s new social condition - and
teach him, with the help of experts and a Russian-Polish interpreter,
the four decades of the Foksal
Gallery?s history.
materials:
slides, video documentation of Santiago Sierra?s work
* We are also proposing a chronological
review of the Gallery and the
Foundation from 1966 until today. |
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