Every Single Crash – Filip Berendt’s art
This text was written to accompany Filip Berendt’s show at L’étrangère, London in 2015. Working in Taiwan a few years ago, Filip Berendt was struck by the profusion and variety of ordinary materials on sale there. Taipei’s shops offer paper, metal foil, plastics and other other everyday materials in dizzying, even excessive, variety. He was … Continue reading
Nervous Systems: New Machines and Bodies in Polish Art and Film after the Thaw
This essay was published in the catalogue accompanying the Cosmos Calling! exhibition at Zacheta, Warsaw, summer 2014. In 1973 Krzysztof Zanussi made a movie, ‘Iluminacja’(Illumination), to explore the ways in which science, the state and religion understood life in its most immediate sense, that of the living human being. Relaying the fictional career … Continue reading
Pop Effects in Eastern Europe under Communist Rule
In September 1974 Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid exhibited four works at an exhibition of nonconformist art in Moscow, which had been reluctantly permitted by the authorities. Two weeks earlier, the artists had had an artwork – a double self-portrait as Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin – destroyed in the notorious demolition of the ‘Bulldozer … Continue reading
Andrzej Wróblewski and the Politics of Testimony
In September 2013, I gave a lecture on the great painter, Andrzej Wróblewski, at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. You can watch it here.
Signora Ladik
This piece was published in the epiphanies section of the June 2013 issue of the The Wire ♦ The centre of Pest – Budapest’s Rive Droite – is dense and busy, packed with elegant buildings dating from the city’s heyday before the First World War. They feature in the elegant images of the Hungarian capital … Continue reading
Sounding the Body Electric. Experiments in Art and Music in Eastern Europe 1957-1984 – II
A new version of the 2012 show opened at Calvert 22 in London in late June 2013. it ran until Aug 26th. Here is a gallery of installation shots – courtesy of Calvert 22. There is also some footage of me talking about the show on the Calvert site here. You can download a pdf … Continue reading
Singing with Beck
This review was published in Eye magazine in summer 2013 ♦ Just over a hundred years ago the music business experienced its first major crisis. The success of new gramophone records played on a hand-cranked turntable with an overbearing horn, sounded the beginning of the end of popular sheet music, the business’s most profitable product at … Continue reading
Honzík – how high the sky?
This is an extract of a talk which I will present at the ‘Afterlives of Constructivism‘ conference at Princeton University in May 2013 ♦ At the height of the period of liberalization in Czechoslovakia in the mid 1960s, architects began imagining the kind of ambitious projects for cities and buildings that went far beyond the … Continue reading
Walking With Hansen
In lieu of the full text, here is a link to a talk on Oskar Hansen’s ideas about the mobile body. It was presented at a conference at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw in June 2013.
LOOKING FOR THE COMMON GROUND: THE 13TH VENICE ARCHITECTURE BIENNALE
This piece was commissioned by Space magazine. It appears in the magazine’s October 2012 issue. Each Venice Architecture Biennale is given a theme by its curator, a leading architect or critic. The 2010 show was gathered under the slogan ‘People meet in architecture’ by SANAA’s Kazuyo Sejima. Two year’s earlier Aaron Betsky called for ‘Architecture … Continue reading
