other cool events in Warsaw......

25.08 - 01.09.2006
Save the date for Villa Holiday Warsaw, Poland!
Raster Gallery with friends cordially invite you to Warsaw for one week of exhibitions, concerts, dance performances, late night parties and lounging in the garden.

Small, private, contemporary art festival and a very long party in misterious Warsaw villa. Young galleries from Europe and USA come to Warsaw with specially prepared projects and display them in countless rooms, cellars, balconies and the garden of the house. All week long in villa also: dance performance from Berlin, concerts, meetings, bar, late night parties and lounge in the garden.

PARTICIPATING ART GALLERIES
All of the galleries represent contemporary, emerging artists.
Daniel Hug - Los Angeles Foksal Gallery Foundation - Warsaw Hotel - London Ibid Projects - London Jocelyn Wolff - Paris Jan Mot - Brussel Plan b - Cluj Raster - Warsaw Zero - Milan

Villa Holiday Warsaw, ul. Barska 29, Warsaw
www.raster.art.pl

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26.08. - 01.09. 2006
Down With the Pimps of Art!
Relationships Between Punk and Art

Exhibition curated by Lukasz Ronduda and Michal Wolinski
organised by Piktogram & Archfilm

The exhibition's title is a travesty of slogan from a banner photographed by the communist secret police during the Jarocin rock festival.Its provocative message was directed against the institutionalised and monopolised - state-controlled - music industry.

The exhibition's aim is to present not so much a conflict between the art world and the punk subculture as an 'alliance of attitudes' that took place when Polish punk was born. It was then that Henryk Gajewski, artist and director of the Remont gallery, decided to overcome an impasse that, in his view, had pervaded the field of contemporary Polish art, a field employing a hermetic language, antagonised (the 'neo- or pseudo-' debate), limited to the activity of a narrow circle of people, lacking a non-professional audience, a field no longer setting any new cultural trends, no longer participating in any broader socio-cultural debate.

Gajewski dreamed of an anti-mainstream culture devoid of hierarchy and an authoritarian centre - composed of equally valid, extremely different currents proposing alternative, to the dominant one, ways of creating, forming one's own image and mentality.

The emerging punk movement fascinated him with its eruption of sheer vital energy that art had long lacked. He started organising recording sessions, concerts, and publications for Poland's first punk bands, such as Tilt or Kryzys. He made highly expressive films about them. For that purpose, he used the infrastructure of the artistic institutions, treated them instrumentally.

With that, he provoked the art community, even its seemingly most progressive factions, accustomed, despite egalitarian declarations, to the 'splendid isolation' of art.

Gajewski adopted the attitude of an artist-manager, using all the most progressive strategies of promotion and production to support punk. Strategies characteristic in fact of pop artists operating in the context of the western consumerist societies. And, importantly, he used them to fulfil his own unselfish artistic utopia rather than in order to capitalise on the movement and turn its music, fashion, lifestyle into sellable products (as was the case with similar creative managers in the West, notably Malcolm McLaren).
Lukasz Ronduda, Michal Wolinski

The exhibition will present films and unique materials from Gajewski's private archive, as well as films, documents, music, and interventions by other artists…
More info soon on www.piktogram.pl