Seminar with mamoru (Japan), Hong- Kai Wang (Taiwan), Barbara Gryka (Poland), Marta Romankiv (Ukraine), Lokatorne - Karolina Breguła & Weronika Fibich (Poland)

Amongst the silence project is composed of two parts: A 3-day workshop under the title wind is a voice and voice is a wind conducted by mamoru and Hong-Kai Wang in Szczecin on May 15-17, and an international meeting of artists at the Arsenal Municipal Gallery in Poznan on May 19, 2024.

The motif uniting invited artists is to find among the silence the voices that are unheard, marginalized, lost in the daily hustle and bustle, muffled by the course of history or local politics. Among the common methods of artistic work, we will find first of all cooperation with local communities, unique sensitivity and attentiveness to the environment with its entanglements.

The artists participating in the seminar give voice to others using their visibility and position in the art world. They listen to individual stories on the basis of which a collective voice, a common story, a cause resounds. They create interdisciplinary situations/places/conditions where the voice of local communities or national minorities resounds.

The Poznan meeting will present selected projects by invited international artists, accompanied by a discussion on practices of inclusion, collaboration in the context of place and the experience of migration.

Hong Kai-Wang is an interdisciplinary artist based in Taipei, Taiwan who works across exhibition making, performance, publication, and workshops that involve collective, pedagogical, and embodied practices of sociality. Her research – based practice is informed by the tension between languages, ideologies, identities, and knowledge regimes. By attending to and contending with the questions of auditory perception and the politics of knowing. Wang’s work seeks to reveal different modes of attention, further conceiving of emergent time- spaces that critically interweave histories of labor, economies of cohabitation, formations of knowledge, and production of desire.

mamoru is a sound artist based in Brussels (BE) and Osaka (JP). Earned B.F.A. from The City University of New York in 2001 and M.F.A. from The Royal Academy of Arts and The Royal Conservatory, The Hague in 2016. The potentiality of what one can experience and perceive through listening has played the most significant role in mamoru’s artistic practice. Over the course of his listening journey, the range of things/matters to be listened to has been expanded from the subtle sounds in everyday life to texts and images that stimulate sonic imagination, and into voiceless histories of the oppressed. The research and fieldwork often takes years before becoming a performance, lecture, installation, film, or video essay. The works incorporate voice, speech, written text, subtitles, field recordings, music and often involve collaboration with others.

Marta Romankiv is an interdisciplinary artist who created art installations, video works and social situations. Born in Lviv, Ukraine, since 2015 lives and works in Poland. As an artist, she is interested in various types of minorities. Particularly, her attention focuses on the issues of nationality, citizenship, and related social inequalities, as well as formal and identity problems. Her projects are usually participatory in nature and are situated on the border of areas of social activity, science, and art.

Barbara Gryka is an interdisciplinary artist from village od Końskowola, Poland. In her practice she deals with performative activities, involving other participants outside the field of art. She is interested in the question of identity and memory, the image of man along with his entanglement with social and political dependencies. She often situates her actions close to the body.

Lokatorne is a place for anti-disciplinary activities, exchange of ideas, knowledge and skills, collective reflection and collective work initiated in 2023 in Szczecin by Karolina Breguła and Weronika Fibich. To be on a lokatorne is to be on a temporary one, as the first residents of post-war Szczecin used to say.

Karolina Breguła is an interdisciplinary artist working with film, photography and installation. In her work, she explores the issue of the status of the artwork, the materiality of art objects and their functioning within an institutional framework. Breguła invites viewers to actively participate in the process, to interact and question established modes of reception. Since 2023, together with Weronika Fibich, she has been running Lokatorne in Szczecin.

Weronika Fibich works with fluid and ephemeral performative material bordering between reportage and documentation. The author of numerous theatrical events, site-specific performances, formal experiments, documentary films, and artistic projects. An antidisciplinary artist. Since 1998, she has been associated with the Theatrical Centre KANA Theatre Centre in Szczecin. Her field of interest includes work enacted both within and outside the theatre; on the border between the private and the public. The subjects she addresses most frequently are the concept of a borderland, in- and exclusion, un/remembering, self-identity, the guest, and “the other”. Since 2023, together with Karolina Breguła, she has been running Lokatorne in Szczecin.