CELEBRATION FACTORY: FILIP MARKIEWICZ

CELEBRATION FACTORY: FILIP MARKIEWICZ
29.09.2018 — 09.12.2018

Curators: Catherine Hemelryk, Kevin Muhlen

Dracula is dead and returns to his tomb. The British post-punk band Bauhaus announced it on August 6, 1979: "Bela Lugosi is dead".

The first actor to have personified Dracula. The group uses the logo of the Bauhaus School, created by Oskar Schlemmer. Today, we all have become a little Bela Lugosi: the vampire dance of the European image can begin. It's time to put on our masks and drink the digital blood until our hard drive is formatted for eternity.

Filip Markiewicz‘s Celebration Factory is the product of a Europe in flux and marked by deep crises, but it is also an artistic response to this new socio-political paradigm. It does not intend to denounce the system or develop a form of political activism, but rather proposes an almost surrealist language that brings together various modes of expression: visual arts, performance, music, debate, celebration.

Celebration Factory aims to find a fluid and artistic language in accordance with our society in perpetual motion. In fact, the Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman talks about a “liquid modernity” where the individual is in the centre. Nothing is fixed, the neoliberal world teaches us a new way of conceiving our existence. The aim of Celebration Factory is to try to represent this aspect of our society through the form of entertainment: party and celebration become the vehicles of an awareness, a questioning of the system that surrounds us or a resistance to the reign of fear.

Celebration Factory evolves—in a way migrates—through time and space and functions as an experimental and artistic laboratory. This migration partly reflects the biography of the artist: born in Luxembourg of Polish origin, Filip Markiewicz today lives in Hamburg. The fact that his project was initiated in 2016 at NN Contemporary Art in Northampton is not a coincidence since Northampton looks back at a large Polish diaspora. From Northampton the project has now travelled to Casino Luxembourg, back to the country that saw Markiewicz grow up.

This second edition of the project shows new productions that the artist has realised during 2018 but also includes a specific programme of performances, concerts, conferences and other interventions that come to integrate and complete Celebration Factory. One of the highlights will undoubtedly be Filip Markiewicz‘s performance, FAKE BETTER – Because a painting breathes when you look at it, but it dies when you photograph it...around texts from Oskar Schlemmer‘s diary with the choreographer Tania Soubry, dancer and singer Edsun and actor Luc Schiltz—a reworked and shortened version of FAKE FICTION, presented at the Theater Basel in June 2017.

In addition, a newspaper will be published as part of the exhibition. Apart from the detailed programme, it will include a trialogue between the artist, Kevin Muhlen and Catherine Hemelryk; excerpts from FAKE FICTION and interviews with Lech Walesa and C. Raman Schlemmer.

A publication is in preparation with the support of aeroplastics, Brussels, and C+N Canepaneri, Milan. Its release is scheduled for spring 2019.

Filip Markiewicz (born in 1980) is a multi-disciplinary Luxembourg artist of Polish origin, who expresses himself through different mediums, including drawing, video and installation, creating a work of great visual coherence. Always seeking explanations for our daily lives, he explores the omnipresence of images and puts into perspective the message they convey. He submits “the news” to a critical and political approach, and thus emphasizes the emptiness of our world submerged by visual overproduction where information becomes reality rather than the opposite. In 2015, Markiewicz represented Luxembourg at the 56th Venice Biennale with Paradiso Lussemburgo, a project, particularly applauded for its cohesion despite the com- plexity and variety of disciplines involved.

Celebration Factory was produced in collaboration with Contemporary Art Northampton