Prototypes 02: Codex Subpartum

opening: 12 April 2019 at 06:00 pm

The collection of Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź includes works which contain elements of musical notation as well as instructions for playing music. There are also works called musical scores and works created for musical realization - we do not deal with most of them at the Codex Subpartum Exhibition. This is because music is not only a complement to visual work or the fulfillment of the wishes of its author. Music is an interpretive tool, it is the discovery of hidden codes, texts and contexts, and it is also a way of showing what is usually impossible to see. Therefore, the exhibition is not a visible to audible translation and does not reduce visual works to graphic scores. It is an attempt to transmute the invisible content of images into "visible" - by means of the sound; rather than finding a score on the surface of the paintings - it is the creation of performance voices, the trajectories of musical gestures moving inward. In Codex Subpartum, we use the sound to search for words in Wacław Szpakowski's great-handwriting, memories in the graphics of Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor, computational algorithms in Suzanne Treister’s diagrams, or distorting vision elixirs in the works of Bob Cobbing.

                                                Michał Libera, Barbara Kinga Majewska, Konrad Smoleński and Zinc & Copper

The exhibition was a part of the Prototypes project to test the concept included in the title on the material from the collections of Muzeum Sztuki in Łodź. As part of it, invited artists used the works from the museum’s resources to try to model our contemporary reality. Thanks to their activities, the museum’s collection turned into a pool of practices and methods awaiting updating, reusing or launching them. This repeated exploitation of the existing works and testing their potential in different contexts was an expression of concern for the sustainability, in the ecological spirit, of "production" of new works. In 2019, within the framework of three editions of the project the following artists were creatively cooperating: Fashion House Limanka, a team composed of Barbara Kinga Majewska, Michał Libera, and Konrad Smoleński, and Carolina Caycedo.

Prototype – is a concept that can serve as a starting point for solutions that help transform reality - it also creates a framework for the whole of this year's programme for the institution. Art is perceived in it as a source of inspiration for new community narratives, a field for testing the critical and subversive potential of artistic gestures, but also as a source of forms for reuse in the production cycle launched by successive generations of artists. In this approach, art does not serve to illustrate the already existing ideas - social, political or any other – but it becomes a laboratory in which new solutions, potentially socially or politically important, are created.

The series of exhibitions carried out as part of the Prototypes project serves to create an open catalogue of activities that can be performed using the museum collection. It is an experiment in the approach to the basic mission of Muzeum Sztuki, which is the mediation between art and the audience - this time it was carried out using artistic means.

Michał Libera – concept, preparation of scores, music

Barbara Kinga Majewska – concept, preparation of scores, music, voice

Konrad Smoleński – sculpture, music

Zinc & Copper – music

Michał Kupicz – sound engineer

Daniel Muzyczuk  – curatorial supervision on the side of ms

Katarzyna Mróz – coordination

Andżelika Bauer - cooperation

Michał Dąbrowski - graphic design

Your House. Łukasz Grabarz – acoustic panels

Exhibition brochure

Exhibition schedule

April 13—21:

Wacław Szpakowski, From the series A: A 1, 1930, drawing

microtonal tuba, trombone, voice

April 23—28:

Milan Grygar, Score, 1973, drawing

microtonal tuba, trombone, French horn, voice, electronics, field recordings

April 30—May 5:

Alina Szapocznikow, Drawing 41, ca 1970, drawing

voice

May 7—12:

Władysław Strzemiński, Untitled, from the cycle: Faces, 1942, drawing

French horn

May 14—19:

Mona Vătămanu & Florin Tudor, Rain [Ploaia], 2005, drawings

microtonal tuba, trombone, French horn, field recordings

May 21—26:

Joseph Beuys, Beuys by Warhol, 1980, graphic print

microtonal tuba, trombone, French horn

May 28—June 2:

Suzanne Treister, HEXEN 2.0 / Diagrams / The Computer From the Antikythera Mechanism to Quantum Telepathology, 2009–2011, graphic print

microtonal tuba, trombone, French horn, voice, electronics, bomb, field recordings

June 4—9:

Bob Cobbing, Untitled, 1976, graphic print

microtonal tuba, trombone, French horn

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