Programme of the screening:

 

 

PAINTER'S PAINTING, 2015, 8:33

 

Wojciech Gilewicz, Painter's Painting, Wideo (HD), 18 min, 2015

 

"Painter’s Painting" (work in progress) is a global journey through cultural stereotypes and clichés as well as different "local" motifs present in art in today's fast way of living and rapid pace of us changing locations. In the video I'm examining the resistance of art to reality and also its capacity to depict it. With traditional, nearly stereotype-like painter’s equipment such as easel, brush, palette, canvas I videotape myself on a variety of social, political and cultural backgrounds to see if art can ever catch up with what is going on, and somehow asking if it really should... I am always dressed in the same way, I perform the same gestures and I do not ever allow the viewer to discern what is being painted, if at all, on the canvas. In my video G20 summit is featured next to a Buddhist temple, fire next to snowy-capped mountains. The whole focus is solely put on the actual backstage and not on the reproduction of it on canvas.

 

I LIVE MY LIFE IN ART, 2010, 6:01

 

INFECTING THE CITY, 2014, 4:09

 

The video, "Infecting The City", was realized during the Art Festival in Cape Town during five days in March 2014. The three forms of painting: body painting; splashing paint in the city realm and the local market with art objects; and "traditional" painting represent three different ways to approach the painting medium. They are more or less contradictory to each other although the shooting itself took place in the very center of Cape Town and was limited to a couple of streets there.

It seems that, while in art (painting) almost everything is acceptable, the social structure of life (represented in the video by people cleaning the city streets) is a raison d'etre of any form of art.

 

ROCKAWAY, 2014 18:29

 

Wojciech Gilewicz, Rockaway, Wideo (HD), 15 min, 2015

 

RESIDENCY UNLIMITED, 2012 8:29

 

"Residency Unlimited" is a performative video project realized over the course of two months in 2012 in New York, during which Gilewicz cleaned the premises of Flux Factory. This action was an exploration of the status of an immigrant while at the same time quantifying the idea of artistic success.

This Polish –American contemporary artist, as a Polish immigrant has always had to face the truth about the most popular jobs for first generation Polish immigrants in the US, namely cleaning and construction. As an artist, he has firsthand experience with these jobs, in order to secure funds for his living expenses and – above all – for the production of his artworks. As Wojciech Gilewicz, a private person, he has always sought cleanliness, order, and harmony.

In March and April 2012 Gilewicz cleaned this New Yorker residency facility-hosting artists from around the world, to explore by himself the intersection of immigrant labor and artistic practice. His goal was not to play the role of a cleaner but to really become a cleaner. He decided to start his project as an anonymous person, working in a building as a sort of a trade worker. In fact he was also trying to limit theoretical approach of any kind to his project and concentrate instead on the simple physical action of changing and organizing the space incognito.

Could cleaning be seen as a tool for beautification and changing reality, in a way that art can sometimes do? How would this project be perceived in terms of art? Can you judge cleaning and its outcome in the same way you judge art? Can a cleaner become an artist as much as an artist can become a cleaner?

Wojciech Gilewicz project, as a two-month part-time unpaid job, and the video exhibition "Residency Unlimited" (Flux Factory gallery space, May 2013) were made possible, among others, thanks to a grant from the Polish Ministry of Culture. This adds yet another layer to the current discussion about the paradoxes of the art system today, its institutions, networks and possibilities that artists have nowadays to create and exhibit their work, especially in the context of the global economic crisis that arts and culture suffer the most.

 

E22, 2015, 14:32

 

Wojciech Gilewicz, E22, Wideo (HD), 15 min, 2015