JOANNA MALINOWSKA & C.T. JASPER
6 May – 22 November 2015
Polish Pavilion at 56th International Art Exhibition
La Biennale di Venezia
Halka/Haiti. 18°48’05”N 72°23’01”W
Do the nineteenth century artistic forms still have the power to represent national identity? Is opera today just a cultural anachronism, a sublimated form of leisure, a medium which, as Slavoj Žižek asserts, has already died twice over, and it would be naïve to believe in its radical potential?
There are the questions that the artists Joanna Malinowska and C.T. Jasper, along with curator Magdalena Moskalewicz, have asked themselves as they decided to travel to Haiti in order to show Stanisław Moniuszko’s opera Halka to the descendants of the Polish soldiers from Napoleon’s legions.