Performans

Description by Filmoteka Muzeum

In terms of their structure, Joanna Malinowska’s project In Search of The Miraculous, Continued... bears resemblance to Krzysztof Kieślowski’s movies. It comprises three films emanating a similar metaphysical-poetic spirit, although they rely on rational avant-garde methodologies. All of them pivot around the analysis of the same phenomenon in its different variations and contexts. They are devoted to two pianists: Glenn Gould and Piotr Anderszewski, and composer John Cage, for whom they appear as somewhat of a tribute.

In the work devoted to John Cage, Malinowska arranged a situation in which his famous piece 4:33 was played on one of the crowded trains of the NYC underground. After the official introduction from a moderator, the place by the small piano situated among the passengers is taken by a woman made up like the famous pianist Margaret Leng Tan, with whom we then contemplate the “concrete” sounds of reality.

Joanna Malinowska’a projects seem to act as a perverse attempt at relating to the traditions of the history of contemporary art and music, as well as to the romantic undertakings of the avant-garde creators, opposing the processes of modernisation. Revisiting the methodologies of surrealism, Fluxus and conceptual art of the 1960s, Malinowska retains them as agents of reality change or taking art above its defined field, but they also become a means to introduce the poetic aspect into the work, an attempt at subordinating it to reality, if only for a moment. The proposed uncanny juxtapositions, encounters and recontextualisations are meant to function as attempts at a poetic transfiguration of reality.

Quoted from: Joanna Malinowska In Search of the Miraculous, Continued..., exhibition materials, CCA Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw 2006.