Aleksandra Polisiewicz \u2013 “WARTOPIA”<\/p>\n
2009 marks the 70th anniversary of the start of the Second World War and the German invasion of Poland. In remembrance, K\u00fcnstlerhaus Bethanien is showing the project \u201cWartopia\u201d by the Polish artist Aleksandra Polisiewicz (curator: Bozena Czubak).<\/p>\n
In \u201cWartopia\u201d the artist essays a virtual recreation of the city of Warsaw according to unrealised National Socialist plans dating from the first years of the Second World War. In architectonic urban panoramas displayed as coloured prints, animations and design models, her visual reproductions reveal an equivocal view of history.<\/p>\n
The starting point for the urban visions of Wartopia, which were generated using 3D-technology, was the National Socialists\u2019 urban developmental concepts: they proposed the complete demolition of Warsaw in order to build \u201cthe new German city of Warsaw\u201d, which would have housed less than a hundred thousand inhabitants. The city model realised virtually by Polisiewicz manifests the ambiguous historical dimension and also disturbs the viewer with its visual attractiveness: the aesthetics of the ensemble are based on elements of a monumental, modernistic classicism that presents itself as an icon of stereotype totalitarian architecture. Polisiewicz\u2019s concept of the totalitarian city can be regarded as a critical mediatising of collective memory.<\/p>\n
Urban Art \u2013 “GLOBALPIX”<\/p>\n
Marek Pisarsky and Anne Peschken have been working together as \u201cUrban Art\u201d since 1985. Peschken and Pisarsky practise interventions into public space belonging to the field of Concept Art, making use of a wide range of artistic media.<\/p>\n
The exhibition Globalpix in Studio 1 shows a selection of large-format \u201cpixel images\u201d as well as a video which has been produced in the style of a documentary soap. In order to create the pixel images, the artists collect painted-on canvases discarded by other artists and cut them into strips so that only slight traces of the original painting remain visible. After this, the strips are interwoven with one another on stretcher frames so that they generate basic structures for new images. These grid-shaped, square fields each represent one pixel when the images are painted later. The resulting images have a very coarse definition that can only be discerned properly from a distance.<\/p>\n
In search of up-to-date aesthetic and painterly forms of expression, parts of the images are painted over to produce a new composition, but fragments of the old painting are retained along with the memory of\/an interlock with earlier art production. Pisarsky\u2019s and Peschken\u2019s depictions of historical themes thus correspond to the double-perspective viewing suitable for pixel-images, for it seems we can perceive \u201chistory\u201d more clearly from a greater (temporal) distance than we can when we are at the heart of (temporally close) events.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"template":"","categories":[],"class_list":["post-3954","kb_exhibition","type-kb_exhibition","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":{"article_image":5641,"article_image_bu_de":"","article_image_bu_en":"","datum_suche":"2013-07-10 09:52:22"},"yoast_head":"\n