Kordegarda Project

curator: Magda Kardasz

Asked to prepare an exhibition at Projekt Kordegarda as part of the city-and-architecture series Room with a View, the artists began by taking a close look at the inner space. They noticed its characteristic features — the number of walls and windows, the arrangement of the furniture. They correctly identified the best places for showing works, but they also paid close attention to those fragments of the gallery that make it different from the typical 'white cube' and somewhat similar to a basement corridor or a 'backstage' part of an apartment, seldom shown to guests (with wall irregularities or pipes sticking out of walls).

The process of constructing the exhibition resembled the work of archaeologists trying to trace back the history, the original functions, of an interior (once a shop, today an art gallery). The artists studied also the boundaries between organised/public/official space and the ugly/private/hidden one. This time, however, knowledge was generated not by removing, exposing, the successive archaeological layers but by doubling various elements of the space's extant structure, sometimes adding works that entered in an ironic dialogue with them. A similar strategy was employed by the artists in selecting the works for the show. Transposing fragments of their private life into a public gallery space, Ania and Adam Witkowski in funny way speak about the origins of their art, asking questions about themselves, about the extent to which their daily environment – house, apartment, the situation of two artists living together as a family – influences their work. Ania and Adam Witkowski work together or separately. This time they have created a joint exhibition in which their individual works enter in dialogue, complement each other, or argue, fighting for a space for themselves – just like housemates sometimes do. Housemates can thus be read as a narrative about the blurry boundary between artistic practice and the artist's private life – about how works of art can be inspired by banal objects that, taken out of their usual context and transposed into the public sphere of the gallery, start living their own lives, telling unique, poetic stories. Kitchen pipes become a sculptural installation, a dynamic form leading the viewer from ground floor to the show's underground part (Ania Witkowska, Zeitgeist). Dialoguing with this sculptural form is a series of Adam Witkowski's new drawings, offering intuitive, abstract, obsessive imagery (the tangled lines seem a cross between automatic writing and conference drawing). In Adam Witkowski's video installation 3 Bowls – White, bought at Ikea bowls play the role of Tibetan singing bowls.
Other works in the show speak about human attempts to achieve a sense of security, about home as an oasis of peace (a spatial installation with a multiplied multi-colour paper model of the artists' home in Gdańsk Wrzeszcz; an idyllic photographic picture showing a group of family members/friends (?) having a luncheon on the grass in a paradise-like park). Sometimes this is a false sense because, besides the official tenants, the flat is also inhabited by spiders (Adam Witkowski, Spiders from Wajdeloty Street) and the borders of privacy and household peace can be violated by annoying spam (Ania Witkowska, List of Names – A Tribute to Douglas Gordon). There are also other works speaking about traces of human life reflected in the material world, such as Ania Witkowska's photographic collection of chimneys on city house roofs. Similar issues are raised by a work created specifically for the Projekt Kordegarda exhibition. The artist so writes about it, 'It is a patchwork made up of different doormats, new and used, with a history and without it. Strange ones and familiar ones, ours. It is an attempt to familiarise space, or even domesticate it, to invite the viewer in. It is also an indication of our culture, too practical perhaps and ridiculous in its manifestations because a doormat is seldom a pretty or designer-quality object. Walking down the corridor of a house and looking at it, I often get the impression that it is a completely abstract entity lying right at the front'. (It is worth noting at this point that some of the doormats have come from the artists' home in Gdańsk while others have been supplied by Warsaw fans of contemporary art).
The work of Ania and Adam Witkowski has often been interpreted in terms of the metaphysics of everyday life, of family work in the field of art, of blurring generic distinctions. As they explain themselves, the individual and their immediate environment are the most frequent point of departure for their work. An attentive viewer will find all these elements in Housemates. Serving as sort of an ironic punchline for the show is Adam Witkowski's collage Almost Paradise.

So if you want to visit an almost paradise, come to Projekt Kordegarda!

Ania Witkowska – born in 1978 in Bydgoszcz. Studied graphics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk (1999–2003). Lives and works in Gdańsk.

Adam Witkowski – born in Bydgoszcz in 1978. Studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk (1998–2004). Practices visual art (paintings, graphics, installations, video) and also sound, and music (radio projects, theatre music, film music, fieldworks). Lives and works in Gdańsk.