Zachęta Project Room

opening: 19.08, 7 p.m.
curator: Magda Kardasz
cooperation: Karolina Bielawska, Julia Harasimowicz

The exhibition I like you, I like you a lot et.al. is the artist’s first solo show in Warsaw. The photographer, born in Kowary, has been living and working in London for many years. In her work one will find both her Polish and cosmopolitan experiences (some series of photographs were taken in Albania, Canada, Germany, Palestine, India). At the exhibition in the Zachęta Project Room Dobrucka shows two series of photos. The first one — I like you, I like you a lot — is a very personal project, started in 2008. It was conceived as a reflection of a family tragedy — the loss of a thirteen year old brother Maks, who drowned during a scouting trip. As the years went by, the series focused on the boy’s closest friends, still living in Kowary or working abroad, who like him were fascinated by the heroes propagated by American action movies. The story of the loss of a beloved person, and a family experiencing bereavement becomes also a registration of uncritical reception of Western pop culture patterns. The second project was realized by Alicja Dobrucka in Mumbai — a city inspiring her and often being the subject of her pictures. In the Scenery series she documents backdrops used by Indian photographers, her pictures becoming a form of excavation, an archaeology of the everyday. The main subject of the photos is the background, and the act of photographing the backdrops changes their context and brings the background to the foreground. Thus the project becomes auto-thematic, it raises the question as to why a portrait needs a background, what is the need to fill in the space of the portrait with an imaginary setting.

Part of the photographed backdrops are painted, artificial landscapes. Landscapes appear also in the series I like you, I like you a lot. They serve as the equivalent of feelings or moods of the people presented on photos, and also reflect the local atmosphere of provincial Poland in the post-communist transformation period.

Alicja Dobrucka was born in 1985. She studied at the FAMU in Prague, Czech Republic, at Goldsmiths College and London College of Communication, London, UK. In 2010 she received the prestigious Deutsche Bank Fine Art Award.

During the opening, a concert of BODO music band will take place.

BODO is a new band on the Warsaw music scene, the result of fascination with Polish cinematography and the music of the 1920-1930's period. The originator of the formation is Szymon Tarkowski, bass player performing previously with such groups as Płyny, Babadag or Pustki. Drummer Andrzej 'Kwiatek' Kwiatkowski (who previously performed with Tarkowski in Płyny), guitar player and music producer Maciej Bąk and unique singer Hanna Malarowska (known from Hanimal) joined. The patron of the project is a cult Polish actor Eugeniusz Bodo, and the musicians decided to name the band in his honor. The musicians reinterpret classic material, but are not afraid of bold experiments.