Thursday 27 October 2011, 6pm
Lecture Theatre 1, Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, London SW7 2EU
(please use Jay Mews entrance)
Polish artist Ewa Partum will be in conversation with curator Dorota Monkiewicz, followed by a Q&A with the artist at the Royal College of Art, London.
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The talk is presented by the Curating Contemporary Art programme at the Royal College of Art in collaboration with the Polish Cultural Institute, London and the City of Wrocław, Poland.
Partum and Monkiewicz will present and discuss the artist’s most important works created between 1969 and 2000s, including ‘The Legality of Space’, ‘Poems by Ewa’, ‘Change’, ‘Women, Marriage Is Against You!’, ‘Homage to Solidarity’, ‘Active Poetry’ and others. The conversation will focus on performance strategies in Partum’s practice in the changing social and political context in Poland from the 1960s until the present day.
Ewa Partum is a conceptual artist, performance artist, film-maker and mail artist engaged in linguistic activities. Born in 1945 in Grodzisk Mazowiecki near Warsaw, Partum studied at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Łódź from 1963 to 1965. She went on to study in the painting department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw from 1965 to 1970, where she earned her diploma through her work in poetry as art. Since 1969 she has been engaged in linguistic activities in an effort to discover a new artistic language. She has taken part in linguistic actions and installations which have been exhibited both in galleries and outdoors. In the years 1972-77 she ran her own art gallery in Łódź,, The Adres Gallery, in which she presented conceptual art and, documentation of the Fluxus artists’ works, among other practices. Since 1983 she has lived in Berlin. Her works can be found in the collections of, among others, Tate Modern, London, Great Britain and the National Museum Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain (‘Active Poetry’, ‘Poem by Ewa’), Muzeum Sztuki, Łódz, Poland (‘Change’), Generali Foundation, Wien, Austria (‘Active Poetry’, ‘Poem by Ewa’), Signum Foundation in Poznań, Poland and in Venice, Italy (‘Hommage a Solidarność’), Frac-Lorrain collection, Metz, France (‘Active Poetry’, ‘Poem by Ewa’, ‘Change, My Problem is a Problem of a Woman’).
Dorota Monkiewicz is an art historian, curator and art critic. For nearly two decades she was a curator of modern and contemporary art at the National Museum in Warsaw. In 1996 she set up the Foundation of Contemporary Art of the National Museum in Warsaw, whose goal was to finance and organize new acquisitions of contemporary art for the Museum. In the years 2005-2007 she worked on the Programming Committee of the new Museum of Contemporary Art in Warsaw. She is also a co-author of the programme of the Wrocław Contemporary Museum Wrocław (2007). In May 2011 she was appointed its director. Dorota Monkiewicz lectures on the Postgraduate Curatorial Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. She has also curated numerous exhibitions and conferences on contemporary Polish and international art, was an author of experimental displays of museum collections and has published over one hundred texts, including essays, articles, catalogue entries, exhibition reviews, catalogues and books on modern and contemporary art, museum collecting, and curatorial practice. She has curated Ewa Partum’s retrospective exhibition (“Samoidentyfikacja”, Królikarnia, Warsaw, 2006) and initiated the publication of an extensive monograph on her.
The concept and coordination of the talk is by Michał Bieniek an MPhil student on the Curating Contemporary Art programme at the Royal College of Art. Bieniek is an artist and curator, and Chairman of the Board of the Art Transparent Contemporary Art Foundation in Wrocław, Poland. His current research at the RCA investigates artistic strategies in the public space in Poland before 1989 and today.