Public-art projects in the ex-Communist National Stadium in Warsaw and in the former Warsaw Ghetto dealing with Israeli Youth Delegations to Poland —

Joanna Warsza & Warren Niesluchowski / Laura Palmer Foundation

CONTENTS:
1. About this Thursday
2. About Live Art Projects in Stadium X in Warsaw and the Stadium X Reader
3. About Israeli Youth Delegations, by Public Movement
4. About Laura Palmer Foundation
5. About Joanna Warsza
6. About Warren Niesluchowsk
7. Useful links and readings to download
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1. About this Thursday

What: Talk, Screenings, Book Launch and Discussion
When: Thursday, November 12, 2009
Where: 16 Beaver Street, 4th Floor
When: 7:00 pm
Who: Free and open to all

Allan Kaprow, in his 1966 essay ‘Notes on the Elimination of the Audience’, sought an experience of daily life through art that would make the viewers unaware of their own role. Joanna and Warren will discuss this ‘elimination’, which refers to a situation where the audience, while communing with art, becomes one of the agents of the performative situation. The talk, the screenings and the discussion will also focus around the issues of the public and publicness.

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2. About Live Art Projects in Stadium X in Warsaw and the Stadium X Reader

The 10th-Anniversary Stadium was built in 1955 from the rubble of a war-devastated Warsaw to preserve Communism’s good name for 40 years. In the early ’90s it fell into ruins, being ‘revived’ by Vietnamese and Russian traders. The area became an Asian open-air market, a primeval garden, a storehouse of urban myths, a piece of Land Art, or a work camp for botanists. The heterotopic logic of the place and its long-standing (non-)presence in the city inspired Joanna Warsza’s curated series of live art projects: The Finissage of Stadium X and the accompanying reader Stadium X —A Place That Never Was;
A Trip to Asia: An Acoustic Walk Around the Vietnamese Sector of the 10th-Anniversary Stadium (2006); Boniek!, a one-man re-enactment of the 1982 Poland-Belgium football match by Massimo Furlan (2007); and Radio Stadion Broadcasts by Radio Simulator and backyardradio (2008)] were subjective excursions undertaken by artists into the reality of a Stadium ‘no longer extant’. The projects, of a participatory and semi-documentary nature, touched upon issues of memory, deterioration, and problematic exoticism, but also the question of the relation of viewers and producers.

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3. About Israeli Youth Delegations by Public Movement

Israeli and Jewish Youth Delegations are the trips organized by the Ministry of Education of the State of Israel for teenagers, not only as a school program to commemorate the Shoah, but also to raise nationalistic spirit a few months before their military service starts. Many young Israelis, often abroad for the first time without their parents, spend two weeks in Poland without meeting a single Pole, which is also due to the strict security standards applied to these organized groups. The majority of Poles is also unaware of the existence of these phantom trips.

A Walk Through The Ghetto Led by Public Movement was a collaboration of Israeli performance artists with a Polish curator, questioning the intouchability of the trips and exploring the political and aesthetic meanings residing in their rituals. Public Movement members, together with their Polish collaborators, led a walk through the former Warsaw Ghetto, in the form of a march, a manifestation, a new and alter- memorial ceremony, a guided tour, and an urban walk along a route in a rare site of civil pilgrimage.

Public Movement operates in public spaces, studies and creates public choreographies, forms of social order, and overt and covert rituals. Among Public Movement's actions in the past and in the future are manifestations of presence, fictional acts of hatred, new folk dances, synchronized procedures of movement, spectacle, marches, all inventing and reenacting moments in the life of individuals, communities, social institutions, peoples, states, and humanity.

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4. About Laura Palmer Foundation, Joanna Warsza and Warren Niesluchowsk

Laura Palmer Foundation takes its name from the character whose absence organizes the plot of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. The label produces actions, conceptual events, and performances.Incorporating real life and fictitious or staged events, confronting experience and its representation, Laura Palmer seeks out new collaborative models.

Laura Palmer is an independent, non-profit label created in 2007 in Warsaw, Poland by Joanna Warsza with the help and advice of Agnieszka Kurant (artist), Janek Sowa (sociologist, activist), and Kuba de Barbaro and Rene Wawrzkiewicz (designers). Each project opens a new unformatted model of collaboration among artists, experts, journalists, activists, institutions, or informal groups.

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5. About Joanna Warsza

A curator and artist on the cusp of the performing and visual arts, she also directs the Laura Palmer Foundation. She works mostly in public space, relating to the invisible, unspoken, ephemeral and immaterial, such as a work around Vietamese community in Warsaw, Israeli Youth Delegations to Poland, or post-Soviet architectural legacy in Georgia and Armenia. She has collaborated with AICA Armenia, CCA Kaliningrad, CCA Kiev, the Centre Pompidou, K¸nstlerhaus Stuttgart, the Manhattan Gallery in Lodz, Nowy Teatr in Warsaw, the Building in Berlin, and Performa in New York.

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6. About Warren Niesluchowsk

Warren Niesluchowsk was born in a Polish refugee camp in Germany after the Second World War and was raised in the United States. As a deserter from the Vietnam war in the late ’60s, he performed with the Bread and Puppet Theatre throughout Europe and in Iran. For the last several years, after studies in linguistics and social theory at Harvard College, he has been working with and for artists, first at P. S. 1 in New York, and then independently, as a writer, speaker, translator, editor, and collaborator.

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7. Useful links

Laura Palmer Foundation
http://www.laura-palmer.pl

Laura Palmer on Picasaweb:
http://picasaweb.google.com/Laura.Palmer.Foundation

The Thing
http://www.thing.net/

Stadium X—A Place That Never Was
http://www.laura-palmer.pl/en/projects/28/stadium-x-a-place-that-never-was---a-reader/

U. S. distributor Textfield;
http://www.textfield.org/

European distributor Motto
http://www.mottodistribution.com/site/

Publishers:
Bec Zmiana Foundation, Warsaw;
http://www.funbec.eu/

Ha!art, Krakow, Poland, 2009
http://www.ha.art.pl/

Public Movement
http://www.publicmovement.org/

Jackie Feldman on Israeli Youth Delegations
http://books.google.com/books?id=nGZYs6QDCJsC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false