Adam Szymczyk and documenta 14

Critics regarded the strategies of the two curators to divide the exhibition chronologically – into a static and a performative side based on the time of day – as a rejection of a curatorial composition of existing objects and a choice of unequal contradictory exhibition venues, as a “subversive” break with and muddying of traditional chronological and spatial ways of presenting art. This was a sort of “guerrilla tactic” that demanded a high level of mobility and flexibility from both artists and visitors alike. At the same time they complained that most of the artworks produced for the Biennale followed similar strategies (“thwarting expectations, questioning rigid ideas, and undermining traditional categorisations”), and had scarcely any relationship to the venues in which they were shown. [11]

Piotr Uklański was once more present from Poland: in front of the main entrance to the New National Gallery he presented a 10 metre high “Faust” made of light grey painted steel piping and put together solely in terms of its contours (Ill. 1). Cezary Bodzianowski (*1968 Łódź), a creator of absurd solo performances, presented videos and current actions in the KW Institute for Contemporary Art: the screens were mounted on a carpet featuring a map of Berlin and covering the whole wall. Ania Molska (*1983 Prudnik), showed videos of the construction of her geometric metal structures, in which farm workers formed a living sculpture at the end of the day’s work. Her metal objects, whose geometrical principles referred back to the Russian avant-garde, were presented in life-size video formats in the Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum, which resembled an abandoned urban space (Ill. 2). In her contribution in the New National Gallery Paulina Olowska (*1976 Danzig) grappled with the work of the Polish painter, Zofia Stryjeńska (1891-1976): she took five of her paintings featuring themes from Slavic myths and Polish folklore and transformed them into monumental, grisaille paintings, thereby emphasising the living contrast to the original compositions. At the same time in the Schinkel Pavilion, she curated an exhibition in which she presented documents and paintings by Stryjeńska alongside her own works. Paulina Olowska also designed the flooring, a repetition of the design in the Polish Pavilion at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, where Stryjeńska had presented her works. (Ill. 3)