WESOLOWSKA
+ HEID
Wesolowska+Heid is a collaborative project between Ewa Wesolowska and Marla Heid. Together, their artistic work navigates a variety of forms and approaches that engage with the sites and situations of the public realm. Their research and practice interacts with notions of spacial perception in relation to memories, movements and transitions translated into visual narratives.
Their collaboration commenced at OPI – Of Public Interest Research Lab, located within the Department for Research and Further Education in Architecture and Fine Art at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm. Within the interdisciplinary community of artists, architects, thinkers, and activists, they have developed models that endeavor to devise innovative techniques and tactics to shape constructed environments and communal spaces capable of modifying the conventions and vernaculars surrounding the public sphere.
In light of the recognition that artistic language and voices play a pivotal role in critically re-evaluating the foundational principles upon which our society is grounded, their interest is to contribute to meaningful transformations in the values and structures underpinning contemporary society.
Marla Elisabeth Heid is a researcher incorporating means of visual art, curation and writing. She studied Art Theory in Berlin and Beijing, holds a Master’s in Art and Politics from Goldsmiths, University of London, and completed the Post-Master degree Of Public Interest at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Both her academic research and artistic interest explore the changes public spaces are going through and discuss the knowledge, methods, and values artistic practitioners produce within. While her academic research analyzes conceptual strategies of artistic practices in public space and investigates the aesthetic appreciation of the dematerialized art object, her visual practice adapts poetic expressions that focus on the development and testing of constructive models that support the critical examination of the public space as a site for democratic interaction through artistic intervention. Within this framework she explores concepts of collective and individual memory, perceptions of space, and the discrepancies of development and decay, permanence and impermanence.
Ewa Wesolowska is a visual artist investigating how individuals perceive time and how the cognitive process of perception, along with one’s attention to it, influences the formation of memories, which in turn affects their longevity and later recollection. The experience of Ewa Wesolowska’s work primarily comprises time and movement. This could entail a momentary pause to facilitate ocular adjustment to an environment with fluctuating luminosity, a gaze transitioning from the left to the right side of a canvas featuring a repetitive image, sequences of steps necessary to activate different elements of an interactive installation, or a traversal along multiple objects. The meditative quality and repetitive nature evident in her process derive from the desire to visualize time and emphasize the ability to represent only a part of the whole. read more..
Blühende Öde
URBAN IDENTITIES IN TRANSITION
Temporal intervention in front of five abandoned spaces, Neukölln And exhibition at Flutgraben, Berlin, 2021
Project page with an interactive map
Practical info
We’re beginning with a walk, one that will take us down the streets of the city. Those we might pass everyday. The familiar – the buildings, the shops, the restaurant, the bars, the hotels, the clubs and the people – composing our perception of our urban environment.
Taking place in Neukölln, Berlin, the project curated by Kunstbüro Hohmann und Heid was an exhibition format on view for a duration of four days, presented in a few different locations. The spaces were be located within walking distance to each other and map the district with an alternative focus – the unused spaces. The exhibition addressed the phenomenon of limited accessibility to such vacancies in two ways: on the one hand, through the representation of critical confrontations in the form of artistic works and, on the other hand, by connecting and acknowledging the unused spaces in our urban environment. Used as a temporary intervention, the exhibition appropriated said empty spaces located in immediate distance to one another, creating an alternative map of unused opportunities. Blühende Öde – Städtische Identitäten im Wandel was a tangible commentary on the exploration of urban space and its transformation in Berlin. The project reflected upon the existing and pandemic related progressing extent of vacant spaces and interrogates the effects, but more so the potentials of this dynamic. The constant shifts in our urban environments and the concomitant change of the spaces we inhabit is a perpetual member of the cities we live in
The interventions set on the streets of Neukölln intent to consciously discover and investigate the empty spaces that surround us in our everyday life and to stimulate a discourse about how to approach public accessibility to such spaces.
When we observe our physical surroundings can we identify the sites that are enduring in contrast to the spaces that are changing?
GRANICA –
– PERSISTENCE UNTIL THE LINE IS A DOT
Research in collaboration with Leibnitz Center for Literary and Cultural Research, Berlin
Granica – Persistence Until The Line Is A Dot is guided by the ambivalent irreversibility of borders and the comprehension of borders imposed in the public space. Borders we might not even identify as such. Borders that have become habits, especially those that are not tangible. What can be tolerated as humane borders, in private and in public. The investigation of public spaces to detect, determine and encounter borders, those that are physical and those non-physical is research subject of the project. It is in our interest to study the innate human impulse to depend on borders, limits, and boundaries and negotiate them. Granica – Presistene Until the Line is a Dot focuses on unveiling the human nature of setting up borders and poses the question of where the line between what we consider a necessity and humanity should be.
What is a border and in what context do we identify them? How can borders be pushed, eliminated, altered, modified, changed, forgotten, remembered, valued? When do they become redundant, obsolete, when important, crucial? And moreover, what are borders promising?
I Draw The Line
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Where the boundary should be between what we consider necessity and humanity. What is a boundary and in what context do we recognize it? How can boundaries be moved, removed, changed, forgotten, remembered, appreciated? When do they become superfluous, obsolete, when important and crucial? What do borders promise?
A border is defined by the outermost perimeter of an area of existence and activity. The German word Grenze (border) derives from the Polish Granica, a term that was only established in the 13th century. Borders are part of our everyday life, whether imposed by external regulations or ourselves. From a political point of view boundaries are considered a manifesto. But we have to accept and realize again and again that borders are never final, but rather remain adaptable according to the respective benefits. If there is constant talk of „a border being crossed,“ what does that border even mean? Therefore, borders must be understood as complex constructions subject to variable consistency.