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From 2010 to 2012 the Wyspa
Institute of Art, in collaboration with the City of Gdansk and Gdansk 2016, launches a series
of international exhibitions, art events, publications and on-line activities
under the title Alternativa. During a
two-year period, this international art festival will bring new perspectives
to the vibrant art scene of Gdansk.
Alternativa aims to investigate the ways in
which contemporary art intersects with the political. It seeks diverse modes
of knowing, and is searching for a performative, affectual apparatus through which we may explore possible
ways of existing in contemporaneity. For the
exhibitions and events, the newly renovated spectacular space, Hall 90B, will
be made available along with Wyspa's and Modelarnia's own spaces.
Located in the legendary Gdansk Shipyard, where the workers' strikes of 1980
began the process of the disintegration of the Communist bloc, Alternativa looks at the atmosphere of political
momentum and its possibilities.
Aneta Szylak
– a curator and writer, co-founder and currently
Director of Wyspa Institute of Art – has just been
appointed Artistic Director of Alternativa
2010-2012. After co-founding and running the Laznia
(Bathhouse) Centre for Contemporary Art (1998-2001) she pursued her career as
an independent curator and researcher. Since 2004 she has been responsible
for programming Wyspa – the intellectual
environment for contemporary visual culture – in the Gdansk Shipyard. In
2005, she received the Jerzy Stajuda
Award "for independent and uncompromising curatorial practice". Szylak's exhibitions are characterised by a strong
response to cultural, political, social, architectural and institutional
particularities and include: Estrangement (with Hiwa
K) at the Showroom, London (2010); Over and Over Again at the
Centennial Hall, Wroclaw (2009); Chosen in the Digital Art Lab in
Holon (with Galit Eilat);
Translate: The Impossible Collection at Wyspa
(2008); Ewa Partum: The Legality of Space
at Wyspa, You won't feel a thing: On Panic,
Obsession, Rituality and Anaesthesia in Kunsthaus
Dresden, and Artur Zmijewski:
Selected Works at Wyspa (all in 2006); Dockwatchers (2005, Wyspa);
Palimpsest Museum (2004, Lodz Biennale); Health & Safety
(2004, Wyspa); Architectures of Gender
(2003, SculptureCenter, New York) and others. She
has taught and lectured at many art institutions and universities including New School
University, Queens
College and New
York University, Florida Atlantic
University, Goldsmith College in London, Copenhagen University,
and worked as a guest professor at the Akademie für Bildende Künste in Mainz,
Germany. Currently
she is finalizing her PhD thesis at Goldsmiths
College in London
and Copenhagen Doctoral
School, Copenhagen University.
The list of curators and projects will be announced this Fall. Events and
exhibitions will accumulate in the summers of 2011 and 2012. Pilot events
are planned for September 4, October 14 and December 3-5, 2010.
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