Various Faces of MOCAK

Since it opened in May last year, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow (MOCAK) has been steadily expanding its permanent collection; its expansive floor space, created when the old Oskar Schindler factory was converted, are also regularly filled with temporary exhibitions. Four will be opened on 16 February.

The main events are a presentation of the Berlin duet EVA & ADELE – crossing the boundaries of gender in life and art – and an exhibition of over a hundred new works of the Cracovian artist and thinker Marek Chlanda. We’ll also see Polish comics depicting popular, reputedly true stories – urban myths – and an individual exhibition of works by Lynn Hershman Leeson – iconic of American feminist art of the 1970s.

Boundaries of identity

Adele was born as a woman, although she has many personality traits usually regarded as being male. Eva – a typical female spirit trapped in a male body – was determined to be finally legally recognised as a woman. In 1991 the couple got married, and decided to use their relationship as a permanent artistic endeavour. The project EVA & ADELE started the same year during the opening of the Metropolis exhibition at Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin. The couple’s motto has since been “Wherever we are is museum”. Every morning EVA & ADELE shave their heads, and carefully apply bright makeup and elaborate costumes. They put on as much of a performance in front of random passers-by as audiences of the most important artistic events. “To better understand the EVE & ADELE phenomenon, we should first look at the issues they refer to in their work to conceal authenticity. They include gender, identity, life, art, authenticity, masks, relationships, and finally creativity. (...) Is it possible to hide an individual personality behind such extensive manipulation?” asks the exhibition curator and director of MOCAK Maria Anna Potocka, and answers straight away, “It seems that it’s not only possible, but it’s even better”.

Reflections on passing

Marek Chlanda, now a classic of contemporaneity, awarded the prestigious Nowosielski Foundation lifetime achievement prize in 1997, debuted in the mid-1970s as a draughtsman. He has always been interested in the entire process, and combined series of drawings with formats such as performance, concerts and documentation. With time he started incorporating fragments of fur, wooden blocks and slats into his drawings, creating installations from everyday objects. Chlanda’s artworks – exploring metaphysical subjects and filled with references to literary traditions, history and mythology – encourage viewers to think and have a powerful effect on the emotions. The impulse to create the cycle on display at MOCAK was observations of crowds of people bustling through the transit zone at a major airport. Transit, transience… The artist was also inspired by the book Forgotten Light, written in the 1930s by the Czech priest and author of oneiric literature Jakub Deml. The resulting cycle is gloomy, unsettling and disquieting. Figural scenes are intertwined with abstraction, realism turns into images on the boundaries of dreams, and the whole creates a tale of transience and duration, of the past and the present, of being inside and outside at the same time.

The museum in Zabłocie district provides a meeting point for different aspects of modern art, which – by posing the most difficult existential questions – at times provokes, and at others speaks in the softest whisper. (Dorota Dziunikowska, "Karnet" monthly)


EVA & ADELE. The Artist = A Work of Art
Marek Chlanda. Transit
Lynn Hershman Leeson. Me As Roberta
Comics: Urban Myths

Photo:
EVA & ADELE, CUM-Polaroid, P130, 1992
Marek Chlanda, Transit (fragment), 2009-2010