Jakub Slomkowski (PL)
THE DESTROYERS OF WORLDS | 14. – 16.6.2019
opening: Fri 14th June | 7pm till 12pm
opening hours: Sat 15th / Sun 16th June | 2 – 9pm
@ Steinenbachgässlein 13, CH-4051 Basel
The solo show THE DESTROYERS OF WORLDS by the aspiring Polish artist Jakub Slomkowski will be exhibited at the new venue of the independent artist-run space kunsthallekleinbasel in the centre of Basel. Slomkowski lives and works in Warsaw, Poland. He is a freelance musician, visual and performative artist who combines these three disciplines in his artistic practice and constantly experiments with them. During the art week Slomkowski will be performing at different venues in the city of Basel.
Jakub Slomkowski, THE DESTROYERS OF WORLDS. Exhibition view kunsthallekleinbasel. Photography: Jasmin Glaab. Basel, 2019.
Jakub Slomkowski (PL)
STOPANDWALK | 12.6.2019
concert: Wed 12th June 2019 | 8 pm
@ Keck-Kiosk Basel
STOPANDWALD at Keck Kiosk is Slomkowski's musical debut with synth, piano, electric ukulel and vocal. After more than 15 years of electronic music on the computer and audio work for contemporary dance pieces by Iza Szostak, in Basel he will play his own live compositions for the first time.
Jakub Slomkowski. Warsaw, 2019. Photography: Lukka Fogiel.
Loïc Bertrand (DE/US) and Jakub Słomkowski (PL)
STYX | 12.6.2019
Performance: Wed 12th June 2019 | 4 pm
@ Steinenbachgässlein 13, CH-4051 Basel
STYX is a performance incorporating electronic sounds in a natural or city environment. First STYX took place in a small lake on the edge of the village, at dusk, when nature gets louder than human. Entering slowly the water with instruments embarked on small hand-made boats, we changed into natural beings corresponding with surrounding voices. STYX is about crossing borders and thought to be performed in different places. The STYX in the Rhine will be the 7th performance from STYX series.
Loïc Bertrand and Jakub Słomkowski, STYX 04. Audioperformance. Sesilus (PL), 2014. Photography: Żuk Piwkowski and Michelle Yom. Sesilus, 2014.
Loïc Bertrand (b.1976 in Saint-Denis, Fr) lives and works in Berlin and New York. He studied Anthropology in Paris, played free improvised and experimental music, toured in Europe and USA. He is actually completing a PhD on Sound Art.
Loïc Bertrand: trucmuchesound
Loïc Bertrand: trucmuchesound
THE DESTROYERS OF WORLDS
Jakub Slomkowski. THE DESTROYERS OF WORLDS. Installation with mixed media (detail). Warsaw, 2019. Photography: Marek Kucharski. Warsaw, 2019.
Jakub Slomkowski
Jakub Słomkowski (1982 in Warsaw) visual and performative artist, musician – combines these three disciplines in his artistic practice and experiments with them perpetually. He studied History of Art at Warsaw University and Painting at Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts and Complutense University in Madrid.
| Curiculum Jakub Slomkowski |
THE DESTROYERS OF WORLDS
Text: Jakub Slomkowski, 2019
Our common experience bases on the fear of the Apocalypse. However, it is the fear we have learnt, rationalised, not exactly emotional, functioning rather theoretically as a tool or an ingredient for a future recipe. By the end of the world I rather mean the end of our culture and civilisation. It is something that will inevitably come but probably not in our lifetime. It is so far-distanced and unimaginable that despite our consciousness concerning the undisputable law of passing, we do not think about it every day. We do not consider it on daily basis that our individual life will pass away one day, much less about the whole humanity being wiped out from our planet. How will it happen? Will it be caused by human activity? This is one of the questions that accompanies me during the exhibition “The Destroyers of Worlds”. And although the discussion on our role in the life process on the Earth is crucial, it is not the main topic that I am working with. I am interested above all in the temperature of the fear I have already mentioned and its transfiguration. A separate issue refers to the shape of the fear, which it takes during the exhibition.
The inspiration to create “The Destroyers of the Worlds” is a war game for children. Building a battle field and directing the game by a child, who can influence the fate of the universum in the room, is a starting point for building the installation that is not a typical child game but bases on its visual roots as well as on the experience of pop culture in the ‘80s and ‘90s.
The title refers to a well-known quotation by Robert Oppenheimer: “I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds”. The words from the Hindu Bhagawadgita cited by the scientist just after the experimental atom bomb explosion in Los Alamos on 16thJuly 1945, less than a month before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Although the world seems not to remember those events, the debate on nuclear energy is still present and atomic powers keep conducting experimental explosions on the screens of their digital supercomputers.
Apart from the issue of security and arms race, what seems to be the most serious threat for the world we love is pollution. Although the work shows the vision of ecological apocalypse, I try to make the message ambiguous and emotions that I want to evoke are rather not a part of ecological savoir vivre. It is a vision that is exaggerated and fantastic. So fantastic and so childish that instead of reflection on our attitudes to nature, it evokes a smile and a question concerning the quality of the disaster… not its marrow.
My installation is a metaphor of a battle directed by a child on a vast layout, on which there is a fight between the army of post-disaster plastic with forces of nature represented by a giant landscape of human hair. The work is a part of my bigger idea. There are other works of my own that have been created in the past 5 years in various galleries in Poland with a common denominator: the symbolism of hair and the shape of objects. In the case of the exhibition in kunsthallekleinbasel there were two significant issues: our attitude to Armageddon, which I tried to visualise and the question of the artwork shape. Where is the border between the artificial and the real? Is such a question in the face of modern art at all justified? Are such issues that once appeared in the pop culture and adapted themselves to it able to return to the sphere of sacrum in the art world? And if they do return then the question is: Is it possible to use successfully the once defined form which was associated with a given order and which was influencing a certain visual arts school? Is it possible to transform it anew?
