EWA PARTUM: The Legality of Space

Wyspa Institute of Art in Gdansk

 

Ewa Partum: The Legality of Space

curated by Aneta Szylak

Wyspa Institute of Art /Wyspa Progress Foundation www.wyspa.art.pl

ul. Doki 1, Building 145B

80-958 Gdansk

Gdansk Shipyard Premises

until August 15th 2006

 
 

“The Legality of Space” constitutes a kind of untypical, synchronic retrospective of the work of Ewa Partum, the outstanding Polish conceptual and feminist artist. The aim of this project is to create new perspectives in the reception of her art. The presentation of the work of this artist, who made her debut in the middle of the 1960s, is built upon the tensions between different periods in her creative work, when the permanently present themes underwent recontextualisation and reinterpretation while retaining the significant elements of her specific language.

 

The project has been constructed in accordance with an imagined vertical axis “cutting through” the building of the Wyspa Institute of Art. In such a designated order, there appear works about the definition of the space of art, the autotelic problems of her language and institutional critique, beginning with her artistic declaration from 1971, presented on the ground floor, and ending with the debate with female curators from 2005. This axis is cut by two horizontal arrangements.

 

One of these is devoted to issues of the body and its representation, feminist problematics, the relations between the private sphere and the sphere o fart and documents about the reception of Ewa Partum as an artist and a woman. In some cases, fragments and materials from her personal life have been transferred to the sphere of art, especially in the often recurring motif of the wedding dress, which has been singled out in this exhibition.

 

The second is connected with the public space, politics and economics. The project defines the real and metaphorical spaces of legality to whose acquisition art aspires and which it does in a real or symbolic way. The exhibition contains the artist’s latest works, which show the new fields of her interest, such as social, economic and institutional critique. In both spheres, what is significant is “the woman’s touch”, which is the conceptual sign linking that which is private and individual with that which is public and social.


 
Because of the specific material, this project poses the question about the documentation of ephemeral art. It asks about various forms of recording. The exhibition also asks about the forms of presentation and interpretation of conceptual art. It identifies the forms of the musealisation and institutionalisation of that in art which is declared as transitory.