After a quiet summer time, it’s time to get back on track with exciting journeys, following the footsteps of the best art. September will be full of artistic events. Travelling with Lynx this fall, we would like to take you to Vienna, Brussels and Warsaw. Between the 8th and 11th of this September, the city of Warsaw will hold a new format of an art fair on the occasion of the 2nd edition of the Hotel Warszawa Art Fair. It will take place in a historic building in the heart of Warsaw, currently occupied by Hotel Warszawa.
On the occasion of the first edition of the fair, one of the organisers told me: ‘We would love to make our art fair international. We hope to attract the attention of foreign galleries and collectors. We are thinking not only about our friends from Germany but also about galleries from the USA, France, Baltic States etc.’ This year these plans will come true.
20 galleries spread across one floor of this luxurious hotel – Hotel Warszawa, will exhibit the works of cooperating artists. Guests will have the opportunity to see 3 galleries run by women: Galerie Molitor from Berlin, Damien & The Love Guru from Brussels, and Galerija Vartai from Vilnius.
On this occasion, I spoke with their representatives. We discussed the upcoming edition of the event, what we can see in their booths/rooms and the current art landscape.
Dobromila Blaszczyk: Can you tell us a bit about your gallery and programme?
Vartai: Vartai Gallery, established in 1991, holds the distinction of being among the first private galleries in Lithuania, coinciding with the nation’s return to independence after decades under Soviet occupation. Since our inception, we have played an active role in shaping the cultural landscape of our country, not only through exhibitions but also by hosting concerts, discussions, and workshops. From the very beginning, Galerija Vartai has provided a platform for artists and musicians to connect with the public, a tradition we continue to uphold.
Today, Galerija Vartai is honoured to be considered a leading contemporary art gallery in the Baltic region. We proudly represent and exhibit emerging and established artists from Lithuania and around the world. The dedication and professionalism of our team have made us a hub for cultural exchange. We are proud to have represented Lithuania at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009 and the 6th Liverpool Biennial in 2010 as the first private institution to do so.
Damien & The Love Guru: Damien & The Love Guru is a Brussels and Zurich based curatorial field of experimentation in contemporary art with an anthropological twist. The gallery stages compelling and non-conventional exhibitions by emerging artists and activates immersions and critical approaches to the cross-disciplinary fields of visual art via independent projects and collaborations. At Damien & The Love Guru we channel the emphasis of an art project as a way to create an inclusive and tangible environment.
Galerie Molitor: Galerie Molitor opened in September 2022 in a residential development collective designed by June14 off of Berlin’s Potsdamer Straße. The gallery aims to create a discursive environment for contemporary art in close collaboration with intergenerational Berlin-based and international artists. Founded by Marie-Christine Molitor, and run alongside Camila Barshee, the gallery is committed to developing and piloting models for a sustainable and distributive work environment for its artists and employees. With five exhibitions to date by Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, Wojciech Kosma, Dora Budor, Edita Schubert and a group show called Love’s Work with Dora Budor, Jesse Darling, I.N. Cape, Ghislaine Leung, Diane Severin Nguyen, Ima-Abasi Okon, and Lydia Ourahmane, the gallery is looking forward to upcoming exhibitions with Penny Goring (opening September 7th), Jesse Darling, Margaret Raspé, Beatrice Bonino, Lisa Jo and Margaret Honda.
DB: What are you planning to show during this year’s Hotel Warszawa Art Fair?
Vartai: In curating this art fair, we’ve carefully chosen artists whose work harmonises with the event’s stylish living concept. Robertas Narkus’s ‘Management’ series, featuring life-sized hyper-realistic photographs, draws viewers into a profound exploration of raw reality.
Narkus gently challenges artistic conventions and market norms, daring to push the boundaries of minimalism. His subjects, bathed in bright, unwavering light, take on a captivating otherworldly quality.
In contrast, hotel spaces designed for transient stays offer a brief escape from daily routines. Here, Vita Zaman’s art shines, embroidered with dedication to fictional autobiographies. Her rich narratives bridge the gap between the fleeting hotel environment and the profound human experience.
Donata Minderytė’s art delves into linguistic translation’s intricacies and evolving meanings. Her paintings, derived from everyday life photographs, intentionally blur detail and contrast, creating space for interpretation. These artworks serve as abstract substitutes for past events, emphasising memory’s ephemeral and subjective nature.
When exhibited in hotel rooms at the art fair, Minderytė’s works gain added significance. The transient setting mirrors memory’s fleeting essence, prompting viewers to reflect on the interplay between translation and transformation, memory and representation. Together, these artists inspire collective introspection, challenging boundaries, and highlighting the beauty in life’s intricacies, all within the backdrop of shared human experience.
Piercing, 2020
Galerie Molitor: We will be showing new works by Polish artist and musician Wojciech Kosma and British-Chilean textile artist Jess Zamora-Turner. For their presentation at Hotel Warszawa, Kosma and Zamora-Turner made work that reflects upon the poisoning of the Oder river, the environmental catastrophe that killed tens of thousands of fish in September 2022 in the river that runs along the German-Polish border. Kosma and Zamora-Turner cross the river regularly, as they live between Berlin and the village of Odra just across the border. Kosma will read his poem ‘Rzeko Rzeko’ in a series of performances throughout the weekend, bringing an embodied element to the constellation of a text-based work, a shrine comprised of sculptural instruments and a textile piece that aim to tap into a radical, empathetic connectivity and healing across time and with non-human forms. The works build upon both artists’ interest in feeling for synergies between transnational solidarity and practices of engaging personal and collective lineage to imagine interconnected futurities.
Damien & The Love Guru: Four artists of the gallery programme: Jasmin Werner, Julian Irlinger, Vanessa Disler, Mickael Marman.
Jasmin Werner (1987 DE, lives and works in Cologne, DE) is exploring architecture of power and objects of status. Her practice draws attention to transnational movements, while occupying spaces of production and consumption. According to Werner’s iconology, one could also argue that the structural moments of our shared reality will necessarily remain within a repetitive continuum of time.
In his practice Julian Irlinger (1986, DE, lives and works in Berlin, DE) approaches past events in sight of future conflicts. Using a variety of media, he combines research with material selected from historical, public and personal contexts. His presentations focus on institutions and images that are related to the writing of history.
Mickael Marman (1983, GMB/NO, lives and works in Berlin, DE) runs Berlin’s nomadic project space, BBBerlin. Being an agent on the battleground of paintings’ history might be less dirty than his canvases, since hijacking in these deposits is a foundation of art. However his distinct mission is the disentanglement of appropriations for the disorientation of myths behind cultural and national identity, stabilised in the spirit of expressionism. His work is not adding difference to that story, it is stressing the ties between obedience and resistance.
Vanessa Disler’s (1987, CA, lives and works in Berlin, DE) practice is centred around painting and is informed by many of Modernism’s preoccupations: the possibilities of abstraction and issues surrounding authorship and signature. She engages with these concerns through the use of visual and processual tropes associated with feminism and psychoanalysis while employing painting as a tool for a direct physical processing of subjective experience. Her gestural paintings and steel sculptures take a nuanced approach to expression, alchemizing visual material gleaned from cultural memory and personal history into motifs and archetypal symbols that populate her work. From 2010-2021 she also worked collaboratively with Nicole Ondre on the Feminist Land Art Retreat.
Between 9 and 11 September 2022, Hotel Warszawa hosted a new initiative bringing together art circles – Hotel Warszawa Art Fair and the best Warsaw-based galleries showcased their art in 20 hotel rooms.
On the occasion, I had the pleasure to talk to Amanda Likus about the fair, art patronage, and the role of art and culture in the approach to brand development.
DB: Yet, since art will be showcased in hotel rooms, it must enter an interaction with them and create a situation that is completely different than in your gallery, white cubes. Will we be able to see some special setup?
Vartai: When placed in an unconventional setting, art can acquire new layers of meaning. The relationship between the artwork and the space can evoke thoughts, emotions, and discussions intertwined with our everyday/domestic life, conversations that might not have arisen in the gallery context.
I believe the main goal in choosing an unconventional space is to craft an experience that transcends the boundaries of traditional art spaces, creating a situation where art becomes an integral part of the temporary guest’s journey.
In my experience, viewing art in spaces where people feel comfortable and at ease can nurture a more intimate and personal connection. Such an environment can often lead to a deeper exploration of the emotions and ideas conveyed by the artwork.
Wherever we’re installing artworks, our focus is to present them in a way that allows each particular artwork to shine its best. By strategically placing artworks of contrasting styles, media and sizes, our aim is to create dynamic synergy that highlights each individual work and contributes to an immersive (and empowering) art experience. Of course, artworks interact with the space’s existing aesthetics, architecture, and function, leading to new layers of interpretation.
Galerie Molitor: Yes, the presentation accentuates the intimacy of the hotel room, as the visitor is invited into close encounters with the work in a space that could almost feel temporarily inhabited. The text-based work, written in river reeds, could almost be the voice of the room speaking. Such forms of encounters are in line with Kosma’s practice, as he got his start in the contemporary art world performing internationally with minimal structure and staging, performances collapsed the private space of intimacy into the public realm, thus foregrounding the social and political implications of care and love as the most essential and complicated of human impulses. Kosma has recently dedicated himself to musical performance under the moniker Spalarnia. Spalarnia explores love, pleasure, intimacy and gender through poetic avant-pop tracks that draw from traditional Polish folk and current dance music vocabulary. Spalarnia aims to establish new, deeply personal mythologies rooted in Polish culture and tradition, while promoting a queer, secular and anti-nationalist sentiment. His poem performance for Hotel Warszawa, as well as the BWKLS Choir which he initiated in Berlin, form something of a bridge between these two sides of his practice.
Damien & The Love Guru: Vanessa Disler will be showing new unstretched paintings that function in the specific context of a hotel room as a cover for a bed pillow and bedspread. These and other new paintings are in dialogue with floral metal sculptural works and photographs in relation to Dubai’s architecture and the workers behind the scenes. The works ‘Etagère (power)’ and ‘Etagère (Palast der Republik) ’ are part of a series of works that Jasmin Werner created in reference to earlier sculptures that dealt with the symbol of the staircase. These tiered objects are made from crockery found in Berlin. ‘Etagère (Power)’ combines samples of electronic parts with Villeroy & Boch plates. ‘Etagère (Palast der Republik)’ is rearranging tableware of the former Palace of the Republic of the GDR. The sculptures are intended as utilitarian objects.
Julian Irlinger’s photographs are part of the series ‘Europe Divided Into Kingdoms’ and ‘Before Time.’ In ‘Europe Divided Into Its Kingdoms’ Julian’s photographs and texts put colonial histories into perspective with the rise of nationalism in Europe. In “Europe Divided into its Kingdoms,” Julian Irlinger’s first solo exhibition in Belgium, eight silver gelatine prints are accompanied by a leaflet with eight short texts, which double as the photographs’ lengthy titles. These extended captions do not, however, align with these pictures of prosaic objects.
While on a trip to the Atlantic coast of Morocco – a long destination for artists – Mickael Marman discovered that the local tote bag craze was for provincial German motifs: a Rheinland Sparkasse; an apothecary in a village on the border between Hessen and Thuringia; a marathon in Kassel. Quite sophisticated, I should say. Marman became interested in the strange presence of these bags in this unlikely location and began to rummage through second-hand shops looking for them. There, he might catch the eye of a fellow tote scavenger. Would they have to compete for the same bag? The shop keeper would also start to grow suspicious. What did these people, so hungrily digging through the piles, see that the shopkeeper did not? And what, then, should be their price?
D.B.: In your view, is it a good time to buy contemporary art? Have the recent world events led to a lot of new interesting art being shown by the galleries?
Galerie Molitor: Yes, it is as important as ever to support contemporary artists, whose work can broaden our perspective and help us understand the world in new ways. We are looking forward to coming to Warsaw for the fair, to connect with Polish collectors and establish a dialogue between Warsaw and Berlin.
Vartai: We believe that the events of the past few years, which have shaken and transformed the world, have sent significant ripples through the artistic community and the art world. What might have appeared as mere pauses, I would like to emphasise, have been profound moments of reflection. During this period, numerous long-held assumptions about various aspects of life, including themes and attitudes, have been fundamentally reconsidered, leading to important revisions.
Notably, events such as the war in Ukraine, Russia’s unjustifiable acts of aggression, and the COVID-19 pandemic, which brought the world to a standstill until recently, have prompted a reevaluation of creativity and the broader role of culture in our daily lives. These occurrences have served as a stark reminder of the necessity of maintaining a deep awareness of the political context and the inseparability of art from politics. They underscore how culture and art function as vital tools in the pursuit of human rights and how creativity profoundly shapes identity and outlook.
This becomes particularly pertinent when contemplating the acquisition of a work of art. Everything that surrounds us, whether directly or indirectly collected, gradually becomes an integral part of our existence, influencing how we perceive the world, our thought processes, and the energy that propels us toward the future, thereby moulding our tomorrow.
In sum, the current moment in contemporary art, shaped by recent world events, offers a compelling and inspiring array of artworks. For collectors who appreciate the confluence of art and the zeitgeist, it presents an exciting opportunity to acquire pieces that reflect the transformative power of art in our evolving world.
Damien & The Love Guru: Collecting contemporary art will always be the case in every time or situation that occurs.
DB: Thank you for your time and good luck during the fair.
