13th February – 24th March

Performer

Threads from Grotowski’s work will be shown from the angle of visual arts: film documentations from rehearsals, performances, actors’ trainings, and interviews with directors. His work will be compared with works of other artists whose inspirations and approach to art, body and spirituality were common or even the same as Grotowski’s.

The exhibition “Performer” emerges from a need to consider Jerzy Grotowski’s work as a significant phenomenon, not only in the evolution of theatre, but also in the context of cultural transformations in the second half of the twentieth century, of which evidence can be found in visual arts, theatre, literature, and philosophy. 

The title of an exhibition, “Performer,” is the title of one of  Jerzy Grotowski’s texts. Regarding this text, Georges Banu wrote, “It should be read as indications of a trajectory and not as the terms of a program, nor a document - finished, written, closed.” The exhibition should be read similarly: its aim is not the whole presentation of Grotowski’s work and achievements. It is not a monograph of a great director and theatre anthropologist. It’s rather a collection of “notes” written on the margin of what is perceived to be the main corps of Grotowski’s work. An exhibition is not a trial reconstruction of famous performances or work from an “after theatre” period. Through the presentation of recorded exercises, fragments of rehearsals, performances, and conversations with Grotowski, it tries to reconstruct the way of his thinking about body as the place for experiencing original spiritual reality.

CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS: Marina Abramovic, Marina Abramovic/Ulay, Vito Acconci, Viennese Accionists (Gunther Brus, Otto Muehl, Herman Nitsch,  Rudolph Schwarzkogler), Lygia Clark, Roman Dziadkiewicz, Joan Jonas, Bruce Naumann, Carolee Schneemman, Grzegorz Sztwiertnia, Hannah Wilke, Zbigniew Warpechowski.

Curators: Magda Kulesza (Theatre Institute in Warsaw), Jaroslaw Suchan (Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz), Hanna Wroblewska (Zacheta)