WHO WHAT WHEN WHERE

Drozd Grzegorz



An artist and keen observer of the spectacle of contemporary life, within which he constructs surprising and uncomfortable situations. He is an artist who toys with custom and ritual, using in his art to suspend conventionalities. He is manipulator, himself declaring that “the artist is a social outcast and criminal”. As a creator, he generates relationships and participation; he is a critic of institutions and the author of works that are vehicles of personal emotion. He is a living object of art, magnifying inequities according to the layering of collective our consciousness.

During the exhibition Inne miasto inne życie [Another City Another Life], he placed a neon sign in a public place in Warsaw: “Information”, and played the role of help desk person, sitting behind the information desk armed with subjective “information” with which he confronted every passer-by. His subsequent piece, Straż Miejska [The City Guard], which is set in a shopping centre security room, referring to Rembrandt’s famed work The Night Watch, and using the participation of officers of the capital city’s City Guard trying their hand at re-creating the image. In one competition he sent a video camera along with instructions to set it up in front of the commission and to turn in on to record the panel as it evaluated the works submitted.

In 2003, as an act of protest, he walled off a corridor at the Academy of Fine Art in Warsaw, and four years later he blackmailed a diploma panel with an anonymous painting, demanding the highest marks they could award. He fled the city with a group of friends, spending eight days without any contact with civilization in woods of Roztocze in eastern Poland.

Drozd describes everyday phenomena using his own language. He demonstrates a situation by opening up before the viewer a type of spectacle in which time, space and characters are forced to play their roles. He is a creator and participant, balancing between the stage and the audience; the absence of a script and motivations for the play form part of the spectacle. He believes that there is no image in the mirror, only a reflection of the image.

For all this, he does not leave behind altogether traditional painting, which were seen at his solo show Widokówki [Postcards] at LETO Gallery, Brak [Lack] at the CSW Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, or the collective exhibition Wzlot białego cygana [The Rise of the White Gypsy] at the Arsenał Municipal Gallery in Poznań. His work also opened the exhibition Establishment at the CSW Ujazdowski Castle. Drozd took part in several artist-in-residence-programs including tenures in Prague and in Budapest.

He is a two-time scholarship recipient from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and a co-founder of the Zmiana Organizacji Ruchu [Change in the Traffic System] program, within which he produced Projekt 6,28 [Project 6.28] in which he “measured” the Eastern Train Station in Warsaw using neon lights.
Letters to my Brother


Grzegorz Drozd’s project entitled Letters to My Brother raises questions about communication: the means and mechanisms of information flow and our sensitivity to them. It encouraged people to think about the direction, strength, and communication potential of art in public spaces. We imagine a situation in which three airplanes appear in the sky in a June afternoon over the centre of Krakow. In a single moment, thousands of spiralling leaflets drop from the airplanes. Clouds of white form over the city, and then slowly drift to the ground among the intrigued people of the city. The situation smashes the spectacle of everyday life, and surprisingly – they advertise nothing; it is not a part of some advertising campaign. Drozd sent invitations for prisoners in penal institutions all over Poland to write letters: letters to us, to the anonymous masses, onto whom a rain of unexpected correspondence falls. The idea for this project was born out of the artist’s personal experience. As Drozd writes in his appeal to the prisoners: “I have named the entire project Letters to my Brother, because I have a brother myself, who I see once a year and can’t manage to form a relationship with, even though I dearly want to.”
Letters to my Brother was a collection of writings and drawings made by people working in isolation, and the artist had compiled them and prepared them in the form of leaflets. We could assumed that the daily lives of prisoners is full of the imagination of freedom, but the content of the letters remained unknown until the project was carried out. The non-standard form of publication that Drozd had selected illustrated the imbalance between two worlds – one imprisoned, and the other “free”. The creator of the project, with a single, simple act sends a message that opened an unexpected channel of communication between them, while leaving, from beginning to end, the situation between the senders and receivers of the message.

Project partner: The Polish Prison Service




Project curator: Piotr Sikora

27/06/2010

11:30 Letters to my Brother

all of Krakow