Dance discussions...
Photography exhibitions
GRAŻYNA GRASA NOWACKA The title of the exhibition: METEORON (an exhibition dedicated to Pina Bausch) Grażyna Grasa Nowacka, an art photographer, a scenographer, a performer and a poet, through the objective lens bound with the dance theatre since a dozen or so years. In her artistic output there are exhibitions in her own country and abroad, stage designs for the spectacles and concerts, awards and distinctions in the field of photography, graphics and literature. She searches for inspiration in all beautiful and unbeautiful things. ‘Meteoron’ is a photographic variation on the subject of human being, captivated by the elements of movement and dance. The human being, who is as light as the smudge of light, and at the same time focused on the inner existence, conscious of the link between the movement and the thought. Interestingly, in Grazyna Grasa Nowacka’s artistic vision a stone is an inseparable companion of a dancer. The stone, omnipresent in her photographs with its invariable greyness, uncovers in front of an attentive observer infinitely many shades. Images of stone and images of human being - moving and moved, to quote once again the well-known words of Pina Bausch, who is the patron of the exhibition - permeate each other, creating an organic whole which merges the living and lively human beings with motionless and inanimate matter. In a few photographs the stone loses its casualness. It takes the form of meteorite, magnetizing the eyesight with its harsh colour and glitter. The meteorite, which is the an unearthy, cosmic, free stone… Tytuł wystawy: MOTION PICTURES Bartek Cieniawa jest absolwentem Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego w Krakowie (Instytut Filologii Wschodniosłowiańskiej), Instytutu Języka Rosyjskiego im. Aleksandra Puszkina w Moskwie oraz Akademii Muzycznej im. Fryderyka Chopina w Warszawie (podyplomowe studia na Wydziale Teorii Tańca). I look at these photographs by Bartek Cieniawa and ask myself just what it is that they're trying to tell me. Here it's something completely different from what was conveyed by the previous series, “mikro-makro”. Those were photographs of a world (makro) reflected in puddles of water (mikro); the series could have been subtitled “Puddles of the World”. Here again we feel the presence of the element water – a drop of sweat seen through the moist lens of the photographer's eye, recorded for us by means of the crystallized lens. This is a world reduced to the stage. A body in a space limited by a horizon, which in some photographs seems to be a distant suggestion of sky, in others a vast, black abyss. In both cases these are but suggestions, things of the imagination, a malaise and a longing, not unlike what we might experience in theatre (is it really so different in actual life?). I share Bartek's fascination with dance theatre and am, I think, for that reason all the more receptive to what these dancers, and the spaces they've chosen to move in, have to tell me. Their bodies seem weightless – apparitions, clones, optical illusions – the arabesques of a signature (whose?) in space, a space as important here as the body itself, a great blackness in which, little by little, the space itself becomes immersed. A very suspicious space – it lacks the third dimension, like in photography. A body without weight, a space flattened to two dimensions – there's no place here for the laws of physics. The awareness of such a state makes us uneasy, it's not something we encounter in everyday life, nor in dance theatre for that matter. But we get something in exchange – an imprint, a record of movements that give the dancers wings. White wings, sulfur wings, wings multiplying bodies that would otherwise be alone, wings forcing groups of dancers into complicity – something always happening here among people: someone waiting, someone running away, someone rushing in to join the others, someone who has all but vanished. This is movement seen as yet one more physical state of matter, invisible to the naked eye, subtle, but capable of multiplying, cloning, bringing people and things together. Perhaps what is being told here is a story of time, a story in which what we see happening actually is happening, but it is also what we imagine we see and wish we could see – and all of it at one unique moment. (Joanna Braun, tłumaczenie: Shawn Bryan). MIEJSCE: 14-21 AUGUST 2010 - ROTUNDA WYŻSZEJ SZKOŁY NAUK HUMANISTYCZNYCH I DZIENNIKARSTWA |
