Artist: Wojciech Bąkowski
Exhibition title: Holiday Power Supply
Venue: SVIT, Prague, The Czech Republic
Date: July 9 – August 20, 2016
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and SVIT, Prague
Holiday Power Supply is a first individual exhibition by Wojciech Bakowski in Czech Republic. This versatile artist exploits his literary talent in visual forms and various medias –from performance, through drawings and sound installations to video. But an essential component of his works is always a “word” and its relation to image. The centerpiece for the show at SVIT is a film „Sound Of My Soul”, awarded at the prestigious film festival in Oberhausen in 2014. According to critics, Bąkowski’s video works are “an arte povera for the digital age”. Bąkowski integrates literature, images and sound for a whole, yet made up of chapters. Each chapter refers to existential and formal questions – the artist freely conceptualizes his own reflections, in search of an expression for vague, unapparent states and emotions. Parallely, he experiments with audio and video editing. Synthetic, animated figures coexist with elements of realistic images, diverse landscapes meet each other; music tracks of different origins and moods overlap and collide with real sounds of human environment. The sound layers of this film are equivalent to his visual and literary ones and in his case fully echo the film’s basic assumption: to build an utterance by overlapping contradictory tones, emotions, and messages.
Wojciech Bąkowski (b. 1979 Poznan, PL, lives and works in Warsaw, PL) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Poznan. Recent solo exhibitions include: “Hideout in the Corner of Level 6”, Bureau, NYC, “Main Issues”, Vosberg, Cologne, “Weak Moods’ Control”; Galeria Stereo, Warsaw; and “Realizing”, Audio Visual Arts, New York. He has been included in group exhibitions “A Million Lines”, Bunkier Sztuki, Krakow, PL; “Prototypes”, XII Baltic Triennial, Vilnius, LT; “It Rained Again”, Bureau, New York; “Voice”, CCA Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw; “The Day is Not Enough”, Warsaw Contemporary Museum; “The Generational: Younger than Jesus”, New Museum, New York. His works have been screened at numerous international film festivals. In 2009 he was awarded the Deutsche Bank Prize. His works are in the public collections of The Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Museum Sztuki, Lodz and CCA Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw.
