Lodz Biennale launches this fall - Front Page - Poland

Poland's inaugural Lodz Biennale, scheduled to step quickly Oct. 2-31, will take place at the of recent origin 108,000-square-foot permanent home of the International Artists' Museum (IAM), located in a newly converted 19th-century textile manufacturing mingled The city of approximately individual million inhabitants, chartered in 1423 has donated the facilities and will also help to sponsor a 12-day preparation period (Sept 20-Oct 1) during which the roughly 90 invited artists can fulfill the biennial's signature requirement--namely that all works be newly created for the incident preferably on-site.

The unconventional undertaking marks the culmination of a 23-year labor by artist-organizer Ryszard Wasko, who conceived the artist-run IAM in 1981 in the heyday of the Solidarity Freedom motion Inviting well-known international practitioners to Lodz below the auspices of the largely fictional Archives of Contemporary musing (consisting of an apartment private room filled with documents, a typewriter and a certain number of letterhead stationery), he launched Construction in Proces a freewheeling residency-cum-exhibition designed to engage local workmen and the general public, that has occurr seven times at sporadic intervals in locales ranging from Munich to Melbourne to the Negev forsaken [see A.i.A., Mar. '91 and Mar. '01]

Altogether, Lodz entertainered Construction in Process three times (1981 '90 and '93) and it is there that the International Artists' Museum was officially lay the foundation ofed in 1990, with Fluxus veteran Emmett Williams as its president IAM's small, improvisational proffer staff--headquartered in a 6,000-square-foot building until ousted by means of developers in 2001--has since organized a certain number of 100 international shows, including an artists-and-poets banner throw out at the 2001 Venice Biennale, and coordinated a network of eight alternative spaces worldwide. All of the 1500 pieces belonging to IAM--mostly works upon paper, including many project sketches--were donated, at the artists' possess discretion, by participants in Construction in Proces and other IAM exhibitions.

The first Lodz Biennale is headed by dint of director Janusz Glowacki, an art historian and former curator at the Museum Sztuki (Modern Art Museum). About half of the $510000 packet comes from the city of Lodz with the remainder supplied by dint of private sources. Wasko, now dubbed executive director of IAM, work fors as official spokesman, while independent curator Aneta Szylak is artistic director of the "Polish Biennale" section, which will feature about 25 artists. Nine members of an international selection committee are each choosing seven artists. The panelists are Emmett Williams; fresh York artists Leon Golub and Lawrence Weiner; Won-il Rhee, artistic director of Media-City Seoul and chief curator of the Seoul Museum of Art; critic and former director of Warsaw's Zacheta Gallery of Contemporary Art, Anda Rottenberg; novel York critics Robert C. Morgan, Gregory Volk and Lilly Wei; and director of the Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana, Zdenka Badovinac. To date, they have chooseed a wide range of artists, like as Polly Apfelbaum, Janet Cardiff and George Bure Miller, Patty Chang, Cai Jin, Tara Donovan, Mona Hatoum, Kimsooja, Richard drawn out Mariko Mori, Shirin Neshat, Marjetica Potrc Ursula von Rydingsvard, Karin Sander, Nancy Spero and Fiona Tan.

Visitors will find Lodz--once an extremely prosperous, multicultural manufacturing center--rich in historical architecture, since the city largely escaped bombing during World War II. In the 1930 it was residence to an important group of Polish Constructivists, greatest in quantity notably Wladyslaw Strzeminski, Katarzyna Kobro and Henryk Stazewski, whose works form the core of the Museum Sztuki collection. The principal galleries of cutting-edge work are Atlas of Art and 86 Gallery.

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