Mala Gallery
8, Zamkowy Sq., Warsaw (Old Town)
30 November - 21 December 2004

 

 

Łódź Kaliska: New Pop - Hiperart

THIS YEAR Łódź Kaliska celebrates its 25th anniversary. Events marking the anniversary will occur throughout the year. These will include numerous actions, exhibitions, public meetings and film screenings. As was the case five years ago, the program of celebrations this time includes events at the Liget Gallery in Budapest and the Little Gallery of the UPAP-CCA in Warsaw, with which Łódź Kaliska has been collaborating since it was created. In September of this year, exhibitions and performances were held at the Liget Gallery in Budapest and at Tirgu Mures Castle in Romania. This installation at the Little Gallery (from December 1) will draw directly on those Hungarian and Romanian events. Emphasis will be given to presenting issues related to New Pop - a phenomenon that emerged in today’s mass culture and has recently been dynamically and aggressively taking over ever broader realms of life.

Łódź Kaliska's members include Marek Janiak, Andrzej Kwietniewski, Adam Rzepecki, Cezary Makary Wielogórski and Andrzej Świetlik.

 

New Pop-Art

IT IS in the recent years the main subject of interest of the Łódź Kaliska group, which changed orientation of its provocative and unconventional approach to art through its interest in mass culture. It is necessary to say that through 25 years of the group's activity its works were often close to the limits of so called high art. Their manifestations, performances, happenings of all kinds were carried out not only in renowned galleries or museums but also in less official places like community clubs and art centers or student clubs.

In 1990's they presented their films that were aimed also at wider audience. These films were even aired by public TV, although not in prime time.

Recently Łódź Kaliska went out to the streets, also literally, changing by programmed events of mass character the Piotrkowska street into an open laboratory of alternative activities, directly influencing inhabitants of the city - including the pub "Łódź Kaliska", which became "a kind of museum/shrine" of the group.

During all these years Łódź Kaliska used to release manifestos expressing current attitude to art and reality of individual members of the group or the group as a whole. In addition to these manifestos they were continuously using photography understood as visualization of their deliberations. Sometimes these pictures were artificially staged and other times they had character of documentary recording of successive organized actions or situations.

New Pop - Hiperart comments upon stronger and stronger attitudes of consumerism evident in the society and upon more and more persistent, far from being gentle attempts to force upon the society some behavioral patterns by mass culture. Łódź Kaliska took up a dialogue with mass culture by melting its activities into a stream of commercial events and trying to blow this world up from within by showing its emptiness and showiness. Now everything on their pictures is nice, sweet, imbued with soft-sex and winning beholder with pettiness of commercial tricks. Proceeding to the paradise proposed by the media world "irritates them because societies proceed to this aim in so laborious way" as Jolanta Ciesielska wrote in the anniversary album. So they are "trying to preserve and clone this commercial paradise in any possible number"*

The attitude of programmed conformism in this matter seems to be another perverse warning given by Łódź Kaliska in relation to the commercialized world.

This world means seducing and smartly prepared ads that are more and more often introducing to its repertoire some elements taken from art and culture. Also from this highest culture. They can not be resisted. That is why now the art may freely draw from the world of commercial ads.

Just in the way Łódź Kaliska is doing successfully.

M.G.

 

*/ Jolanta Ciesielska, „Popi kultury”, Łódż Kaliska Muzeum - Nr 1 (01) New Pop, Listopad 2004., Wydawca: Stowarzyszenie Artystyczne Łódź Kaliska. ISBN 83-921664-0-X

 

 

See also:

• Łódź Kaliska's website

 

Earlier in FOTOTAPETA...

• "Dwa kroki do przodu i jeden do tyłu, czyli tango ze Świetlikiem"
  - Andrzej Świetlik w rozmowie z Adamem Mazurem i Mariuszem Chacińskim (2002)
• Łódź Kaliska w Warszawie: "Tramwaj zwany pożądaniem" (2001)
• Łódź Kaliska w Małej Galerii i CSW (grudzień 1999)
• 20 lat Łodzi Kaliskiej - inscenizacja "Bitwy pod Grunwaldem" Matejki (maj 1999)

 

In FOTOTAPETA also:

• All exhibitions in Mala Gallery since 1997

 

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