9th Open City Festival in Public Space 2017
ESTRANGEMENT
3-31.10.2017 / Lublin
Artists: Jakub Ciężki, Elżbieta Jabłońska, Zuzanna Janin, Agnieszka Kalinowska, Anna Królikiewicz, Jacek Niegoda, Hanna Nowicka, Anneé Olofsson, Patrycja Orzechowska, Joanna Rajkowska, Janek Simon, Aleksandra Ska, Piotr Skiba, Dominika Skutnik, Magdalena Starska, Mariusz Waras
9th Open City Festival of Art in Public Space was officially opened on 3 October with a curatorial tour. Artists presenting their works during this year’s event and art lovers visited all 16 installations located in the city centre and the Old Town of Lublin.
Open City festival is the largest and oldest presentation of contemporary art in public space in Poland. It was created with a view to opening Lublin to the arts. It. The recurring event offers an opportunity for art to come into a dialogue with the residents and the urban texture, thick with meanings due to its vivid history.
This year, the curator of the festival is Aneta Szyłak, a curator and writer, recently responsible for the making of NOMUS – New Art Museum in Gdansk. She previously worked as founding director of Wyspa Institute of Art (2004−2014) and Łaźnia Centre for Contemporary Art (1998−2001). Since 2010, she has also worked as an artistic director of Alternativa – International Visual Arts Festival.
Estrangement is an exhibition in the urban space created in response to the collapse of the system of values that used to govern the relationships in the world as we knew it. Wars, disasters, humanitarian crises and aggressive global economy, all coupled together, have not only destroyed the natural resources that ensure the survival of humanity, but also depleted materials and visual resources allowing to describe this world in a credible way. We can neither touch it nor see it, although we constantly depict it. The festival will attempt to find a new alphabet of intellectual and visual signs able to depict the vanishing form of the world and recognise the new one that shall only reveal itself.
This year artists will challenge the definition of art form. They have chosen some unexpected objects, natural forms and forms based on discoveries, occurrences and illusions. Estrangement is a project requesting a form that complies with the estrangement principle, that is going beyond popular interpretations of signs, and challenging all that has already been named and recorded.
The exhibition will last until 31 October 2017. The event celebrates the 700th anniversary of Lublin receiving the town charter.
Promoter of the festival is the “Crossroads” Centre for Intercultural Creative Initiatives in Lublin.