Public-Art Projects in the Ex-communist Stadium and in the former Warsaw Ghetto
Joanna Warsza and Warren Niesłuchowski / Laura Palmer Foundation / Warsaw, Poland
Talk, Screenings, Book Launch and Discussion
Thursday, November 12, 2009, 7:00 pm
16 Beaver Street, 4th Floor
New York
Free and open to all
www.laura-palmer.pl
The 10-th Anniversary Stadium in Warsaw was built in 1955 from the rubble of a war-ruined Warsaw. It was to preserve Communism’s good name for forty years, by the mid-'80s, it fell into ruin, becoming a post-Communist phantom. It was 'revived' by Vietnamese intelligentsia-cum-vendors and Russian traders, pioneers of capitalism. An open-air market called Jarmark Europa became the only multicultural site in the city, a storehouse of biographies, a major tourist attraction, a primeval forest, a realm of precarity and discount shopping, or a work camp for botanists. Its heterogeneity, its longstanding (non)presence in the middle of the post-Communist city, the invisibility of the Vietnamese minority, the debate around the new National Stadium here for the Euro 2012 football cup, and the lack of a critical debate on Poland's post-war architectural legacy — inspired Joanna Warsza's curatorial project Finissage of Stadium X.
A Trip to Asia: An Acoustic Walk Around the Vietnamese Sector of the 10th-Anniversary Stadium (2006); Boniek!,a one-man re-enactment of the 1982 Poland-Belgium football match by Massimo Furlan, (2007); or Radio Stadion Broadcasts by Radio Simulator and backyardradio (2008) were subjective excursions undertaken by artists, activists and athletes into the reality of a Stadium 'no longer extant'. The result were projects of a participative and semi-documentary nature (a walk, a football match, a Sunday radio station, a spectacle on a building site, an exhibition featuring real people) which touched upon issues of memory, deterioration, the power of imagination, ambiguities, and the future, as well as on the problematic exoticism of a disappearing place.
The readerStadium X-A Place That Never Was offers a selection of texts presenting a multi-faceted picture of that site's deterioration and its existence as a 'city within a city' and also documents the series of live art projects. The Stadium and its parasites functions, which are now being erased form the map of Warsaw will likely become some distant planet, while the present publication, with the brilliant contributions from its authors, will attain — perhaps — the status of an unreal story about a place that, after all, never was.
Stadium X — A Place That Never Was: A Reader
Edited by Joanna Warsza
Contributing authors: Claire Bishop, Sebastian Cichocki, Benjamin Cope, Ewa Majewska, Daniel Miller, Pascal Nicolas-Le Strat, Warren Niesłuchowski, Marek Ostrowski, Grzegorz Piątek, Cezary Polak, Anda Rottenberg, Roland Schöny, Pit Schultz, Tomasz Stawiszyński, Stach Szabłowski, Ngô Van Tuong, Tomasz Zimoch
Design by René Wawrzkiewicz
Photos by Mikołaj Długosz, Marta Pruska, Marta Orlik
Published by Bęc Zmiana Foundationand Ha!art, Warsaw and Kraków,2008/2009
U. S. distributor Textfield; European distributor Motto
Laura Palmer Foundation takes its name from the character whose absence organizes the plot of David Lynch's Twin Peaks. The label produces actions, conceptual events, and performances. Incorporating real life and fictitious or staged events, and its representation, it seeks out new collaborative models.
Joanna Warsza, a curator and artist on the cusp of the performing and visual arts, also directs the Laura Palmer Foundation. She works mostly in public space with the invisible, the ephemeral or staged situations — around the Vietnamese community in Warsaw, Israeli Youth Delegations to Poland or post-Soviet architecture legacy in Georgia and Armenia. She has collaborated with AICA Armenia, CCA Kaliningrad, CCA Kiev, the Centre Pompidou, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, the Building in Berlin or Performa in New York, among many other projects.
Warren Niesłuchowski was born in a Polish refugee camp in Germany after World War II and was raised in the United States. While a deserter in Paris in the late ’60s, he performed with the Bread and Puppet Theatre throughout Europe and in Iran. For the last many years, after studies in linguistics and social theory at Harvard College, he has been working with and for artists, first at P. S. 1 in New York, and then independently, as a writer, speaker, translator, editor, and collaborator.
The book and the events were created with the generous support of the City of Warsaw