Riverbeds: flow forces
exhibition by Anna Kedziora
28.06-25.08.2024
vernissage: 28.06.2024 (Friday), 7:00 pm
Author-curator tour: 29.06.2024 (Saturday) 2:00 pm
SIC! BWA Gallery Wroclaw
pl. Kosciuszko 9/10
Exhibition by Anna Kedziora Flow forces goes deep into the riverbeds. It uncovers invisible worlds and ideas about rivers and invites people to do things together: building, observing, touching and creating relationships with the river. It represents the latest installment of a long-running project Riverbeds a Poznan-based artist. The exhibition can be seen at the SIC! gallery in Wroclaw throughout the summer.
We are water bodies
With this artistic metaphor by Astrida Neimanis (Bodies of Water) begins the curatorial text for Anna Kedziora's exhibition by Tuçe Erel, a Turkish curator and writer affiliated with Art Laboratory Berlin. The area of Kedziora's creative exploration is the embodied memory of river bodies. In her practice, the artist combines field work and research, studio activities and archival research. The main medium she starts from is photography and photographic thinking. She experiments with ceramics, video and installations. Exhibition Flow forces is another installment of one of her latest projects: Riverbeds, which focuses on the relationship between people and rivers. Started in Cambodia, it has continued in Poland, France and Germany on the Middle Rhine.
Artist explores riverbeds
Anna Kedziora's project at the SIC! gallery goes beyond one particular river and encompasses any river - heavily regulated by structures erected by human hand. The artist explores riverbeds and their human-acquired and colonized surroundings, proposing connections based on gestures of empathy. In working on the exhibition, Kędziora used primarily photography and clay greenware. This is the term for unfired, extremely delicate and fragile clay that can return to the earth's circulation.
Exhibition co-created with viewer(s)
Riverbeds: flow forces is an open invitation to collective action: co-experiencing the creative process, contact with matter, establishing bonds and finding affinity between water bodies. With her works, Anna Kędziora allows us to dive below the surface and reveals invisible river imaginaries. By rolling stones out of clay and inviting visitors to share the gesture, the artist mimics the creative forces of nature. In doing so, she questions the endurance of the creations of both nature and man.
What the works are made of
The human-nature dichotomy has been symbolically represented by the artist in stone, glass, ceramics and photographic material. Throughout the summer at Kosciuszko Square, visitors will be able to see, among other things, a fragment of a photographic series showing plant relics from riverbanks or an installation of sandstone blocks, as well as interact with Anna Kedziora's works. We have planned a series of accompanying events, including the creation of river stones with the artist, a series of Wild Clay and guided tours.
Exhibition documentation
ANNA KĘDZIORA - (1982, Poland) visual artist, graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts and Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, PhD in visual arts, assistant professor at the Department of Photography of the Magdalena Abakanowicz University of Arts in Poznan. Curator and co-curator of photography exhibitions (including at the 9th Biennale of Photography in Poznań, 2015; TIFF festival in Wrocław, 2016; European Month of Photography in Berlin, 2016; Interphoto Festival 2017 in Białystok; Month of Photography in Riga, 2019; Chiang Mai Photo Festival in Thailand, 2020). A participant in artist residencies in Spain, Thailand, France, she has presented her work in solo and group exhibitions and at conferences in Poland, Germany, Austria, Spain, Greece, Wales, Sweden, Indonesia, Korea, Slovakia, Portugal, Belarus, Lithuania, Malta.
He defines the broad area of his creative pursuits with the working title Conflicted Landscapes, its axis is landscape understood as a process - a dynamic construct, a network of relations between people (though not only) and place - shown in various contexts: historical, social, ecological. In his artistic practice, Kędziora explores the traces of man in nature and its various manifestations on a micro and macro scale. Traces imprinted in relations with non-human beings, in the inanimate matter of places and the living tissue of nature. Her projects have dealt with the relationship between landscape and power, landscape and trauma, landscape and loss, among others.
TUÇE EREL - (1981, Turkey) curator, art writer residing in Berlin. Her curatorial interests include archival practices, ecology, the Anthropocene, posthumanism and post-digital theories. Erel applies her sociological training to her curatorial research, preferring to change and challenge conventional social science methodologies. In recent years, she has explored the notion of hacking as a way to open up notions of biopolitics, the Anthropocene, ecological crisis, naturoculture, artistic speculation and imagination. She has been a member of >Top Transdisciplinary Project Space since 2017, and has been active at Art Laboratory Berlin since 2020.
Artist: Anna Kędziora
Curated by Tuçe Erel
Curator of the gallery program: Mika Drozdowska
Production: Patrycja Scisłowska
Promotion:
Corporate identity: Maciej Lizak
Stage design consultation: Hubert Kielan
Assembly:
Editorial supervision: Joanna Osiewicz-Lorenzutti (supervision), Małgorzata Poździk (editing), Patrycja Pączek (proofreading)
Cooperation with the audience: Zofia Straczycka, Magdalena Weber
Partners:
Media patrons: Photography Quarterly, WhiteMAD
Organizer: BWA Wrocław Contemporary Art Galleries