Sorcha Dallas

Charleston

Opening Saturday, January 14 2006, 6 – 9 pm Exhibition January 14 – February 9 2006 Opening hours Thursday- Saturday 2-7 pm and by appointment

Performance by Cezary Bodzianowski at Chelsea Hotel, 222 W 23 Street, New York Friday Jan 13, 11 am

In 1996 the Polish artist Cezary Bodzianowski paid a visit to a family living in an apartment block in the centre of his home town of Lodz. The building hosts the Galeria Manhattan, its name reflecting the random accumulation of such blocks in that second biggest city of Poland. The artist walked into the apartment and stayed for 16 hours, trying to blend in with the family’s life. A photo of his intervention, titled Nattahnam, shows the artist in the apartment’s interior looking out of the window in a grey suit and melancholic posture.

The scenario is characteristic of the subtle interventions Cezary Bodzianowski would invent, meeting situations in public and private spaces – in the past

mainly post–communist Poland – which he comments and alters often just by his sheer presence. But Bodzianowski is not just a medium or a ‘Zelig’ character getting completely consumed by the circumstances surrounding him. If he submits himself to a situation, humble and modest, it is mostly bound to fail in a constructive and grotesque way, as in Black Man Listening to Black Music on a Black Background, apartment Lodz, 1996, ‘The story of my Negritude: I painted my body black and listened to black music while lying on a black background. I thought that would be enough, but I was only panted over’ (CB).

Some early objects the artist created, like Stalemate, object *(1993), a miniature chessboard attached to the handle of an umbrella, or the *Holy Footstool, object (1992) have the particular poetic charm of the Surrealist or Dadaist time and bring to mind George Brecht’s object-events. There is the same mysterious conceptual connection between object and performance in Bodzianowski’s works. And these materializations indeed never appear independently of the artist’s interventions into real life situations. They often only exist as an image, not even as a photograph that could circulate as a commercial item.

The noble timelessness of his artistic persona maintains some distance and resistance to every situation he gets involved in. Bodzianowski is a passer-by, a flaneur in the very anachronistic uncorrupted sense. He converts and adds to a given situation certain activities and objects which become metaphorical in a whimsical way and intensify the meanings and atmospheres of social, historic or political settings.

Arriving in New York City for the first time in his life Cezary Bodzianowski reacts to this new urban circumstance in the same way. The project Charleston – evoking an ungraspable past of the city – formulates in a unique and poetic way the artist’s perception of the city as an entity that is only accessible to a very relative extend. The sensation of slight curious discomfort is expressed in the gallery space in this enigmatic intervention vaguely reminiscent of an early Polanski scenario of obscure alienation.

Anke Kempes

Born in 1968 Cezary Bodzianowski works and lives in Lodz, Poland. Recent shows include ‘Hidden in a Daylight’, Cieszyn, Poland, curated by Foksal Gallery Foundation (2003), Film programme at Centre Pompidou, Paris, (2004) and a soloshow ‘Ein und Aus’, Koelnischer Kunstverein, Germany (2005).