Filip Markiewicz at Kunsthalle Osnabrück

Artist: Filip Markiewicz

Exhibition title: Celebration Factory

Venue: Kunsthalle Osnabrück, Osnabrück, Germany

Date: November 29, 2019 – February 2, 2020

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Kunsthalle Osnabrück

Kunsthalle Osnabrück presents Celebration Factory an evolving exhibition and performance project by Filip Markiewicz which started in 2016 at NN Contemporary Art Northampton and which was continued at Casino Luxembourg (2018) and at CCA Derry-Londonderry (early 2019).

While Europe and the world are entangled in their own contradictions in still celebrating economic growth and technical progress as the salvation horizon of humanity, Markiewicz invites to dive in an universe of signs and images which perform the emptiness of our current discourses. His exhibition is partly a stage on which individuals can act as spectators of the decline of their own civilisation, where the myth of automobile ends in desolate cemeteries of rusted engines and isolated, useless tyres, where giant bank notes vehicle the deceptive, obscene spectacle of politics and media (self-)representation, and where all revolutionary and emancipatory pulses sink in the slump of the illusion promoted by endless consumption and by the art world itself. As the artist stated in his theatre performance Fake Fiction (Theater Basel, 2017): “Today, we all have become a little Bela Lugosi [1]: the vampire dance of the European image can begin. It’s time to put on our masks and drink the digital blood until our hard drive is formatted for eternity.”

Through a combination of various modes of expression including visual arts, performance, music, debate and celebration, and in cooperation with dancers, actors and musicians, Markiewicz explores the possibilities of an artistic language that encourages individual awareness and personal resistance to the reign of fear, giving no lessons nor providing vain hope. Such a language may be understood as an utopic quest to escape from the servile and mephitic attitude of “business as usual”, and may recall the spirit of the young La Boetie, who magnificently stated, already in 1576: “resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed.”

The exhibition at Kunsthalle is organized in collaboration with NN Contemporary Art Northampton, Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’Art Contemporain and CCA Derry~Londonderry, is funded by Niedersächsisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur and supported by the Association of Freunde der Kunsthalle Osnabrück e.V., Ableton, the FOCUNA Fonds Culturel National Luxembourg and the Oskar Schlemmer Bühnen Archiv.

[1] Bela Lugosi is the first actor who has personified Dracula. The British post-punk band Bauhaus, which uses the logo of the Bauhaus School created by Oskar Schlemmer, announced in 1979 ”Dracula is dead and returns to his tomb”.

Filip Markiewicz, Celebration Factory, Exhibition View, Kunsthalle Osnabrück, 2019/20, Photo: Filip Markiewicz, Courtesy Filip Markiewicz / Kunsthalle Osnabrück