17. 9. 2022 18:30
František Kowolowski
Stalin Letná / Prague 7
PLATFORMA ≠ 4 / Escapist dysfunction of identities
In his performance for the Re-connect Art festival, František Kowolowski deals with questions of the quality of digital space in the context of philosopher Michel Foucault's reflections on other spaces - heterotopias. Within the structuralist tradition, which understands the world as a set of relations, these special spaces/non-spaces are constituted through texts, language and symbols. They specifically reflect the ordinary world, mirror its problems, make crises visible, and serve as places of escape from reality or one's own corporeality.
In the dialogue of the physical body with place and time, surrounding nature and architecture, with text and water, and with the help of personal and found objects, František Kowolowski demonstrates the relations of concepts (unconscious forms, archetypes, imaginary identity, the reality of alienation, the reality of perception...) within the four-dimensional model of human existence: space - power - knowledge - escape... Escape from space and time by creating an autonomous zone, defining space and the model of the body, escape from personal time, escape from the power of virtual identity, looking at one's own corporeality and attempting the impossible: escape from corporeality.
František Kowolowski (*1967) studied at the Painting Studio of Jan Tarasin and Ryszard Winiarski at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. He works with painting, performance, installations, video and photography. In his work, he also uses his own experience with the background of artistic operation. He covers topics such as ephemerality, art recycling, the connection between a thing and a certain place, and manipulating its meaning in a certain context. He works primarily as part of the Ostrava art scene typified by a specific form of artistic subversion and irony. He explores the possibilities of an artist’s own bodily deployment. In addition to his own creations, he also works as a curator. He has worked at the Moravian Gallery in Brno, the Young Gallery, the Gallery of the Good Shepherd and the G99 Gallery of the Brno House of Arts. As a teacher, he was the head of the Painting II studio at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ostrava and in the past as an external teacher at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno. He is also the author of curatorial projects at MNAC in Bucharest and Arsenal Gallery in Bialystok.