17TH MEDIA ART BIENNALE WRO 2017 DRAFT SYSTEMS 2017
Featuring the latest works by artists from all over the world, the International WRO Media Art Biennale is Poland’s main forum for new media art and one of Europe’s leading arts events.
This year’s exhibitions, shows, meetings, performances and concerts will be staged under the motto of Draft Systems. The phrase represents the mutability of the world’s regulatory systems, highlights their complexity and instability, underscores their volatile control-defying nature and foregrounds on-going reorganisations of reality.
Held at 17 venues across Wroclaw (e.g. at the WRO Art Center, the National Museum, Ballestrems’ Palace, the Renoma Department Store, the National Forum of Music, the White Stork Synagogue, Entropia Gallery and, for the first time, at the Feniks Department Store), exhibitions and shows will present projects by artists invited by the WRO Art Center’s curatorial staff alongside entries selected from among 1300 received from all over the world in an open call.
One of the Biennale’s highlights will be Suzanne Treister’s HFT the Gardener. The multi-layered and multi-dimensional project blurs the boundaries of art, nature, language, mathematics, economy and the trauma of history. It examines correlations and rules of economic decision-making dissociated form scientific insights, mysticism and psychedelics resonant with the global market and the interaction of esotericism and the economy/financial sector.
Facebook Algorithmic Factory will address the process we undergo in changing from a user to a commodity of the capital market. Placed in one of Wroclaw’s streets, a monument called The Cyanometer will measure the blueness of the sky and, at the same time, gauge air pollution.
Carolin Liebl i Nikolas Schmid-Pfähler, Amplified-Entity, WRO Art Center, WRO Biennale.
The WRO Biennale also serves as a platform for experimentation by Polish artists. In his project, Paweł Janicki will explore the artistic potential of the Reverse Polish Notation, a historic achievement of what came to be known as the Lvov-Warsaw School of Mathematics, a world-renowned movement of philosophy and logic in its day.
Maciej Markowski, whose Quartet for Tomatoes has been performed in Wroclaw and Warsaw in recent years under a joint venture of the WRO Biennale and the Musica Electronica Nova festival, will this time show his Mute Music, an installation developed in collaboration with John Zorn.
Among the May events, there will also be presentations of projects produced by the WRO Art Centre’s artists-in-residence. The Eastern Park, which in 2016 hosted the WRO’s gigantic wooden Megaphones amplifying the sounds of nature, will be a stage a night show/installation/performance of Andrey Ustinov’s Film Noir will take place.
There will also be an opportunity to see a kinetic object sustained and moving in the electromagnetic field, the latest work by Carolin Liebl and Nikolas Schmid-Pfähler, who have found inspiration in their visit to the WRO Art Centre and workshops with the young audience.
During the Biennale, the leading specialists in digital culture and communication, including Alek Tarkowski, Mirosław Filiciak and Paweł Janicki, will take part in the Culture Networks 1 meeting to discuss the condition of digital culture in Poland and the Internet as a cultural model that inexorably affects entire culture.
Another Biennale event will the third edition of the Competition for the Best Media Arts Graduation Projects organised by the WRO Art Center and the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wroclaw. The competition showcases the most compelling graduation projects from art schools at Gdansk, Katowice, Cracow, Lodz, Poznan, Szczecin, Warsaw and Wroclaw. The prizes are awarded by an international jury.
Of course, the Biennale programme includes also Little WRO – a series of shows and events dedicated to children and their families, This year, the Kraszewski family, friends of the WRO Art Center ever since 2008, have been invited to co-develop the programme. This innovation is informed by the idea of giving voice to an entire array of viewpoints – insights and preferences of young children, teenagers and parents alike.
As in previous years, a rich programme of the 2017 Museum Night has been designed for several of the Biennale’s venues.
A foretaste of the WRO Biennale will be given as soon as in March by an exhibition of Norimichi Hirakawa. One of the most interesting Japanese media artists of the young generation, Hirakawa works at the intersection of arts and science. In his first solo show in Poland, he will present algorithmic installations, including two entirely new projects he developed especially for the WRO during his residency at the Kavli Institute of the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, University of Tokyo. The exhibition opens on 31 March, 2017.
Suzanne Treister, HFT Gardener Diagram, WRO Biennale 2017.