Alternativa 2013 theme and team
Professional preview: May 23, 2013
Official opening: May 24 at 7pm
Wyspa Institute of Art
Ul. Doki 1/145B
80-958 Gdansk, Poland
Registration and inquiries: Radosław Orzeł, pr-wyspa [at] wyspa.art.pl
www.wyspa.art.pl
www.alternativa.org.pl
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Artistic Director: Aneta Szyłak
Alternativa is a recurring art exhibition that has been organized since 2010 by the Wyspa Institute of Art / Wyspa Progress Foundation in the 90B Hall of the Gdansk Shipyard. It is an inquiry into timely topics implicated within the location of practice. The previous exhibitions held in 2012 include Materiality and Wyspa: Now is Now as well as Estrangement and Labour and Leisure in 2011.
Following the 2010–2012 pilot program of the Alternativa International Visual Arts Festival, the project is now continuing and in 2013 was set up by the following team: Aneta Szylak (artistic director), Solvita Krese (curator), Jacek Friedrich (academic advisor), Maks Bochenek (curator and general producer) and Hubert Bilewicz (curator of educational program). We’ve also consulted with a number of scholars and advocacy groups. The list of artists will be announced shortly.
Till tomorrow! Ideologies of city planning and the tactics of dwelling
A city is never finished they say. The making of a city is always connected to a futuristic approach. The metropolis we envision won’t perhaps be the one we are to inhabit. The planned future of the city implicates all aspects of dwelling, encounters, politics, leisure and access to knowledge. The Alternativa 2013 curators have taken on the urgent subject of city planning and its ideologies as well as the everyday tactics of dwelling and inhabitation in it. Locating its practice in the heart of the Gdansk Shipyard, Alternativa 2013 is both a result of research as much as a matter of concern for us.
Taking Gdansk as a point of departure but not limiting the project’s reach to just one location, Till Tomorrow! approaches the subject of city planning as an ideological one. The XIX century defortification of Gdansk was the first of several subsequent demolitions for both political and economical causes, realized and unrealized modernization plans, which have mirrored the often-turbulent political shifts. This very particular case study is thus an opportunity to begin a broader debate on the question: What does it mean to change a city? And what does the city itself mean? How do the reconstruction of the city, its representation and the traces of history, like so much composite palimpsest, influence that meaning? How can it be changed today? What is our, the inhabitants, everyday approach to living in the city?
Here the inquiry towards the city as both public and historic responsibility, as well as the pragmatics of dwelling, becomes a centre of gravity. Today, on a global scale and in shifting intervals, serious modification of cities, linked to the movement of capital, migration, and the redefinition of the idea and location of labour are fundamentally changing our functional understanding of the city. Cities are being strategically re-planned and rebuilt, while at the same time, the dwellers customise their immediate surroundings, reclaiming the city for themselves.
This is also the subject of Gdansk and the new city quarter, dubbed the Young City, to be built in the Gdansk Shipyard. Thus the exhibition titled Till tomorrow! Ideologies of city planning and the tactics of dwelling is a show with a view of the Nowa Wałowa Street (New Wall) Street being built. Here we will look at the new city centre in construction while insightfully exploring today’s practices and the historic utopias of city planning.
Alternativa 2013 is a project conceived and produced by the Wyspa Institute of Art / Wyspa Progress Foundation in collaboration with the City of Gdańsk with additional funds provided by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland and the Austrian Cultural Forum in Warsaw.
