Zachęta Project Room

curator: Magda Kardasz
cooperation: Julia Harasimowicz

Andrej Polukord carries out his artistic activities mainly in the countryside, although he sometimes performs actions in which architecture and urban infrastructure are used. The artist was born and brought up in Vilnius, then he studied in Vienna and nowadays lives partly in Vienna and partly in Vilnius. Towards the end of the summer he spent several days in Warsaw at the invitation of the Zachęta Project Room. The idea of the exhibition in this space emerged after the artist’s return to Vilnius as a result of his reflection about the place/places to which he belongs. Will his home town remain always such a place? Is the fact of falling in love with new visited places a kind of betrayal? The author himself does not avoid terms from the romantic lexicon. Such is exactly the title of the exhibition, while the shape of the heart has become the project’s leitmotif.

Polukord usually finds creative inspiration in the objects around him and observed situations. They become a point of departure for staging surprising actions or creating extraordinary objects intended to shake spectators out of the rut of traditional thinking and direct their attention to the hidden sense of events and ambiguity of the world.

The artist is an author of drawings, paintings, installations, objects and performances. The photo and video documentation of the majority of Polukord’s actions is done by his friend, the cameraman Marius Krivičius.

The motif of the heart, dominating in Polukord’s new project, has appeared earlier in his artistic work, namely in the picture from the series Woodobjects. Over the road in the forest near Vilnius he suspended, at the beginning of this year, a red heart as a greeting for car drivers and passengers on the occasion of St. Valentine’s Day. A large-format photo and film documenting this project are shown on the ground floor of the Zachęta Project Room. Next to them, there are drawings and objects (’ephemeral sculptures’) which continue the same theme. The part which shows the previous exhibitions of the artist, located in the basement, resembles a total cartoon where documentation of separate pieces is linked by handwritten author’s signatures and drawings on the wall.

As far as the spatial concept of the exhibition is concerned, the new works and actions performed at the vernissage by Andrej Polukord supplement, in an interesting way, the irregular space of the Zachęta Project Room, revealing its hidden nooks.

History of the Ripped-Out Heart is a sentimental story about growing fond of places and people, recounted in the aesthetics of kitsch.