Iza Tarasewicz, No Title, watercolour on paper, courtesy to the artist
From 8 October until 15 November 2020, the State Gallery of Art in Sopot presents Disturbances and Multiplicities, a solo exhibition by Iza Tarasewicz featuring highlights from the last decade of her idiosyncratic art production. Drawing inspiration from the philosophy of atomism, information theory, biology, quantum physics, and chaos theory, her sculptures and installations often take the form of modular, mobile, and reconfigurable systems that are adjusted according to the spaces in which they are displayed. Working from her home in a small village in Podlasie, Tarasewicz utilizes rural logics and humble materials to invoke communal exchanges of energy and labor between humans and their environments. By organizing material information, she explores forms of survival and making sense in an increasingly chaotic world.
With the unprecedented situation of COVID-19, impending environmental disaster, war, and the eruption of mass demonstrations, our world today is in a state of constant turmoil and precarity. The exhibition Disturbances and Multiplicities addresses these dynamics of disruption and order by emphasizing the roles that noise, turbulence, and the spontaneous assembly of the multitude play in our social, ecological, and formal systems.
Using raw and ready-at-hand materials, Tarasewicz’s artworks test out group dynamics, arranging collections of forms within an interface to model relations. The repetition and aggregation of elements provoke a sensitivity to moments of disequilibrium, revealing where a system breaks down and confusion gathers and self-organizes. Her practice encourages us to consider how production and relationships are organized across scales, connecting the economic, biological, political, and social world to the molecular and the cosmic.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is an 800-meter-long loop of black silicone rope that drapes from the ceiling and crisscrosses throughout the exhibition space. Its title, Arena III, refers to ancient enclosures where events would take place: the amphitheater, the stadium, and the marketplace, the first stages of politics, recreation, performance, debate, and collectivity. In 2018, this work was wrapped around the venerated building of the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, provocatively declaring the museum as a site for public discussion. Here, the massive circle is brought from the outside in to produce a soft and fluctuating architecture akin to a dense jungle of vines or a giant intestinal track. The monumental liana is an instrument for mark-making, for bounding entities together and dividing. This three-dimensional drawing traces a route of loops and twists, generating an abstract choreography for the eye and the body, and framing the rest of the exhibition.
A key component of the exhibition is a selection of preparatory drawings and a series of hanging assemblages made of entangled nets and dense forests of delicate metal rods. These works chart relations and linkages within a matrix, accentuating the importance of noise and multiplicity in communication. Spontaneous and improvised as if tracing out a thought process, the compositions are diagrams of possible architectures and recall the role of repetition in folk traditions. This connection of the handheld to the monumental is also present in a photographic series and other objects that model parallels between cellular, social, agricultural, and celestial interactions.
A set of oxidized steel display apparatuses and wall-mounted reliefs organize cluttered information. Appearing as a form of outdoor shelving or almost as rusted rudimentary spacecrafts, the machines collate and display inventories of base materials such as plant fiber and iron oxide color pigment. The aggregates produce multicolored formations that are at once abstract and familiar, displaying principals of fusion and fission. Information is embedded in these combinations of materials, which are metabolized and organized within a productive system. At the margins and boundaries of the exhibition space, yellow ochre pigment accumulates like dust. Titled Yellow Coal, this installation references a short story by the Polish-Ukrainian author Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, where a society channels bad feelings, anger, suffering, and negativity into a limitless energy resource. Iza Tarasewicz’s practice invokes this reframing of bodily and ecological economics through technologies of preparation, distribution, and connection. She mobilizes a functionality of abstraction to make visible the inventiveness of life to harness and accommodate dynamic, uncertain, and destructive forces. For the exhibition Disturbances and Multiplicities, we will consider how such experiments in organizing the noisy masses can help us imagine a reordering of our world.
PUBLICATION
The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication, designed by Marcel Kaczmarek and Maciek Bychowski, which will document the exhibition and give a survey of the artist’s last decade of production. Featuring texts by the artist, the curator Post Brothers, the artist and theorist Piotr Bosacki, and the curator and academic Marta Lisok, the publication will add productive noise into the transmission of Tarasewicz’s work.
Iza Tarasewicz (b. 1981 in Białystok) graduated from the Faculty of Sculpture and Performing Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań in 2008. She lives and works in Kolonia Koplany, a small village near Białystok where she was raised. Working in sculpture, installation, drawing, and performance, her work has garnered significant acclaim both at home and abroad. She was the winner of the 2019 Bayerischen Kunstförderpreise in Fine Arts and the winner of the VIEWS [Spojrzenia] 2015 Deutsche Bank Foundation Award, the premiere prize for young art in Poland, co-organized with Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw. In 2013, she was a nominee for the Passportu Polityki Award for Visual Arts. In 2016 she participated in the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, 5th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, and the 11th Gwangju Biennale, and in 2018 she represented Poland at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale in collaboration with Centrala. Her work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally, at such venues as Pori Art Museum, Finland (2019), Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb (2018), Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius (2018), KUMU Art Museum, Tallinn (2017), Galeria Arsenał, Białystok (2017), Nogueras Blanchard, Madrid (2017), Futura, Prague (2016), European Central Bank, Frankfurt (2016), CCA Toruń (2016), Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw (2015), Kunsthalle Bratislava (2015), Galleria Civica di Modena, Modena (2015), Polnisches Institut Berlin (2014), Krolikarnia X. Dunikowski Museum of Sculpture, Warsaw (2013), amongst many others. Her monumental installation Once Information Has Passed Into Protein is on semi-permanent display at the Museum of Fine Art Leipzig, commissioned by Art Collection Telekom. Her works are currently featured in the group exhibitions Keeping the Balance (Ludwig Muzeum, Budapest) and One Swallow Does Not Make A Summer (Kunsthaus Dresden). In November 2020, she will participate in the NARRATIVES 12 festival in the Wrzeszcz district in Gdansk, and the group exhibition Sculpture in Search of a Place at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw.