Photo: Art Stations Foundation.
The Art Stations Foundation by Grażyna Kulczyk is presenting the first performance to come out of a series of artistic residencies held in conjunction with the exhibition For Each Gesture Another Character, which marks ten years of the foundation’s existence, bringing together for the first time its exhibition and performative programmes.
The fusion will result in the Art Stations Gallery’s space turning into stage for three young choreographers: Magdalena Ptasznik, Aleksandra Borys and Anna Steller, who will be Art Stations’s residents during the exhibition. Their temporary interventions at the gallery will be a reference to the works on display and their common motifs. Each of the three residencies will end with a public performance whose departure point will be understanding drawing as a physical, if ephemeral, trace of body movement in space.
The outcomes of the first residency will be presented on 15 February (5 pm) at the Art Stations Gallery. In her many works so far Magdalena Ptasznik has shown that she sees choreography as a tool to create conditions in which time, space and bodies are experienced and perceived in an alternative way. She views the body as a vehicle of this experience:
Edward Krasiński’s blue line is running on the surface, without penetrating the depths, meanings, symbols. Instead, it operates in the sphere of spatial relations, materiality, all that may be perceived. I’m interested in the simplicity and power of this gesture – a gesture that activates perception. What if we make the object of our work the very event of two surfaces meeting, touching, clashing, rubbing against each other, or scratching, marking or disrupting each other? What characteristics of the body/objects will these events reveal, what will they activate, how will they transform the way they are perceived, or experienced?
Magdalena Ptasznik is a choreographer and performer. She graduated from the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam and hold a degree in sociology from the University of Warsaw. In 2007 she qualified as a contemporary dance instructor completing a course at the Mazovia Culture and Arts Centre in Warsaw. In 2011 she was selected to take part in the DanceWEB programme taking place as part of the Impulstanz festival in Vienna, and Meet the Next Generation taking place in conjunction with the eXplore Dance Festival in Bucharest. She has studied with Deborah Hay, Ria Higler, Benoît Lachambre, Xavier Le Roy and Robert Steijn, to name just a few. She creates mainly solo pieces (including surface.territory conceived as part of the Solo Project 2012 at the Art Stations Foundation by Grażyna Kulczyk;or exercises for a Hero,secrets). Her works have been shown in the Netherlands, Germany, Portugal, Romania and Poland. In 2013 she took part in NRW Tanzrecherche, the German residency programme for emerging choreographers, where she started her work on surfing, a project devoted to materiality, objects and their surfaces, and the way they are perceived, which is to debut on 17 May at the Art Stations Foundation. She lives in Warsaw, where she co-founded Centrum w Ruchu (2011), the first choreographic studio and association of independent artists in Warsaw.
Next presentations by Art Stations residents:
15 March 2014, 5 pm, Art Stations Gallery
Aleksandra Borys
26 April 2014, 5 pm, Art Stations Gallery
Anna Steller
