Ewa Partum, Politics is Temporary Art Remains

Ewa Partum’s solo show Politics is Temporary Art Remains presents artist’s works created between 1950s and today. The selection of monumental photographs, realizations of conceptual ideas, documentation of performances and multimedia installations are focused on the development of innovative forms of artistic creation taken up in the Neo-avantgarde and Conceptualism period as well as on the artist’s social practice, which is most strongly associated with her feminist movement addresses. The opening will be accompanied by the artist’s performance in which she argues with the literary tradition of Kraków avant-garde and uses Tadeusz Peiper’s writing.

Ewa Partum’s artistic ideas discuss the new type of universal issues. They do not refer to lofty social and political narrations which once seemed to be a monolith and now became thinned down by contemporary aspects. Politics understood as implemented ideology is changeable. Creations of political thought are short-lived, change together with the economic situation, losing ideas on the way. Because the language of art is not a traditional form of communication i.e. a set original system, it refers to transient meanings applied to each subsequent, different and individual interpretation. Art is interpreted by subsequent generations and is still alive – through found and generated meanings.

Consistent artistic stance resulting from experiments in conceptual poetry (e.g. Active Poetry, 1971-1973), tautology (e.g. Exercises, 1972), media research (Drawing TV, 1976) is characteristic of Ewa Partum’s conceptual and ephemeral work and is further developed into artistic social practice – accurately and uncompromisingly questioning the status quo. Ephemeral actions and documents based on them stigmatize stereotypical women functions in society, institutional culture (Stupid Woman, 1981) and tradition of art (Hommage a Leonardo da Vinci, 1986). This places Ewa Partum among female authors of most accurate contemporary social criticism. No less striking are the relatively recent actions aimed at redefining of the public and the private, displaying their intermingling in face of tragedy and their mass media spectacles which entitle public viewing of tragedies (Catastrophes happen daily, art is rare, 2001/2006). What seems to be connecting the seemingly differing areas of the abstract world of conceptual ideas and the issues of embroilment and exclusion are traditional values: originality and loftiness of artistic idea as well as equaling art with the notion of knowledge (An Act of Thought is an Act of Art, 1989).

Exhibition curator: Krzysztof Siatka

Ewa Partum in the years 1963-1965 studied at The Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź, and later (1965-1970) at the Faculty of Painting of The Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. She is a conceptual artist and one of the most eminent contemporary performers. She combines her artistic activity with animating the environment of artists working on issues of new art. Since 1972 she ran an author’s gallery Adres in Łódź which exhibited contemporary avant-garde but also functioned as artistic laboratory. In 1982 the artist left Poland. Presently she works in Berlin. Her artistic output has been exhibited by Modern Tate Gallery (London 2006), MOCA (Los Angeles 2007), National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington 2007), Reina Sofia Museum (Madrid 2006), National Museum in Warsaw (2006, 2008), Manifesta 7 (Rovereto 2008) and others.

Ewa Partum, Politics is Temporary Art Remains
Kurator: Krzysztof Siatka