FLUXUS IMPORT/EXPORT – Emmett Williams and his Adventures in Poland

FLUXUS IMPORT/EXPORT Emmett Williams and his Adventures in Poland

exhibition: 13. June – 30. August 2015 in the atrium Opening Friday, 12. June 2015 – 7 p.m.

The current Fluxus-Exhibition in the museum FLUXUS+ in Potsdam shows the exciting connection between an American artist Emmett Williams, who lived in Berlin, with his polish friends. The exchange of the artists’ thoughts and ideas will be represented with the help of drawings, artbooks and texts, installations, collages and films.

Emmett Williams first trip to war-ravaged Poland was on a cattle boat bringing livestock from America to Danzig in 1945. His mother had been born in the town of Przasnysz near Warsaw and came to the USA when she was 16 years old.

Williams met Jaroslaw Kozlowski in 1981 when they were teaching at the Hochschule der Künste in Hamburg. Kozlowski is Professor at the University of Fine Arts in Pozan. He founded the alternatve Galeria Akumulatory 2 there, to which he invited a great many international artists during the 1970’s and 1980’s, including those from the FLUXUS group. Williams and his wife, the artist Ann Noël, went for the first time to Poznan to exhibit at the Akumulatory 2 in 1981. The gallery was a meeting place for students, artists and intellectuals. It was there that they met Andrzej Dluzniewski and Cezary Staniszewski (who ran galleries in Warsaw), Tomasz Wilmanski (the artist who runs the Galeria AT in Poznan) and other Polish artists: Joanna Adamczewska, Wlodzimierz Borowski and Hanna Luczak.

Emmett’s and Ann’s association with Dluzniewski’s Galeria Piwna led to the exhibition ON/OVER at the National Gallery of Warsaw in 1987, and that with Staniszewski’s Galeria Riviera Remont, to the International Seminars on the Arts, ETCETERA I & ETCETERA II, in 1987 and 1988, to which Emmett Williams invited about fifty of his international artist-friends together with a similar number of Polish artists.

Jaroslaw Kozlowski received a stipendium from the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm in 1985. Another DAAD guest was Ryszard Wasko. He had made history with the first “Construction in Process” event in Lodz (1981) and later one in Munich (1985). In 1990 Ryszard Wasko opened the International Artists’ Museum in Lodz and declared Emmett Williams to be its Honorary Director/President. There were “CinP” events all through the next decade, there as well as in Israel, Australia and Poland. Another artist from Lodz, Wojciech Bruszewski, also resident in Berlin during the early 1980s, was involved with the organization of the Artists Museum. The exhibition at the Museum FLUXUS+ will present works and photo/video documentation of all these artists/friends, including a film by Maria Wasko of a Fluxus Banquet made in 1995.

We are looking forward to welcoming you to the opening on friday, 12 th June 2015 – 7 p.m.

Curators: Ann Noël and Jaroslaw Kozlowski