Carolee Schneemann LIFE BOOK
Through February 16, 2014
WRO Art Center
Widok 7
Wrocław
Poland
Exhibition concept: Marielle Nitoslawska
Curators: Piotr Krajewski, Viola Kutlubasis-Krajewska
On the occasion of the LIFE BOOK exhibition, the WRO Art Center hosted Carolee Schneemann for the first time in Wrocław and in Poland.
Schneemann, a pioneer of performance art, body art and avant-garde cinema, has spent over five decades ‘breaking the frames’ of the art world, using a wide range of expressive forms and challenging our attitudes toward feminism, gender, sexuality and identity.
The Carolee Schneemann LIFE BOOK exhibition is an expansion on Mariella Nitoslawska’s film Breaking the Frame, documenting Schneemann’s life and work. The exhibition is a new approach to material that Schneeman and Nitoslawska created during six years they spent making the film.
Nitoslawska, a Canadian director and documentary filmmaker, used a rich variety of film formats in her very personal film portrait of Schneemann. The film is a study not only of Schneemann’s life and work, but also of space—physical space, private space, conceptual space—and the boundaries between painting, literature, performance and film.
The Carolee Schneemann LIFE BOOK exhibition breaks the frames once more: The multimedia and multidimensional installation involves unique photographs, sketches, fragments of diaries and letters, film and video sequences relating a story that parallels Nitoslawska’s film. In the exhibition, as in the documentary, creative issues and biographical elements intertwine, forming a portrait of Carolee Schneemann and her groundbreaking achievements, which helped to shape the restless and questioning course of contemporary art around the world.
Events accompanying the LIFE BOOK exhibition:
A talk with the artist
with Carolee Schneemann, Marielle Nitoslawska and Karol Radziszewski
Screening of the Breaking the Frame documentary
with a Q&A with Marielle Nitoslawska and Carolee Schneemann
From December 2013
Carolee Juvenile: a set of drawings from Carolee’s childhood
From January 2014
An interactive installation by Paweł Janicki, enabling the audience to directly and intuitively browse through the content of Life Books
Finissage: February 13–14, 2014
A film retrospective of Marielle Nitoslawska, with the filmmaker’s participation, including Bad Girl (2001), Number 8 (1984), Sky Bones (1998) and other films and shorts
