participants:

AEEI_VD (_Virtual Dreams) group: Aleksander Błaszkiewicz, Izabela Sitarska, Ewelina Cichocka, Łukasz Tomaszewski (Dj Elvira)

Karolina Belter/Weronika Wronecka

Róża Duda/Michał Soja

Mateusz Kula

Magdalena Lazar

Osmo Nadir

Yan Tomaszewski

Arsenał Municipal Gallery launches a nationwide competition for young artists who use new media and experiment with the visual arts and sound. The competition is divided into two stages. In the first phase, selected from the submitted applications is a group of nominees whose art will be presented at an exhibition in Arsenał Gallery. In the second phase, the nation-wide jury will select the laureates of the competition. The winner of the Grand Prix will receive money and will moreover hold an exhibition at Arsenał Municipal Gallery and have their catalogue published.

The competition aims to commemorate the outstanding Poznań artist and educator Leszek Knaflewski, an author of installations, objects, photographs, drawings, videos, and audio performances. Since the 1990s, his work was at the crossroads between visual arts and music. He died on 6 September 2014. In 1980-1985 he studied at the State Higher School of Fine Arts (later the Academy of Fine Arts, today the University of Arts) in Poznań, where he obtained a diploma in painting. He was a co-founder of the Koło Klipsa group, of which he was a member between 1983 and 1990 and co-authored all of its public presentations. He collaborated with many musical groups: Rasa, Sten, Socrealism, Art Sound Project, Drum Machina, and Kot. Since 1990 he was an active teacher. He was a professor at the Faculty of Multimedia Communication (Intermedia major) of the University of Arts. His alumni are such artists as Wojciech Bąkowski, Piotr Bosacki and Konrad Smoleński.

The underlying idea of the competition is to promote creative attitudes connected with the search for new tools of artistic expression in the field of media art, visual arts, broadly understood sound art, and performance. The competition aims to emphasize the importance of radical and courageous choices of young artists who associate their lives with art.

The project carried out by Arsenał Municipal Gallery in cooperation with the Department of Intermedia of the University of Arts in Poznań highlights the importance of the local artistic tradition of the so-called "Poznań school" and at the same time turns towards the future in search of innovative artistic solutions and experiments.

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Concert for Leszek Knaflewski In Memoriam

Suma 4.30 Collective

Leszek Knafewski – drawings

Robert Curgenven – record players, effects, mix

Krzysztof Cybulski – double bass, trumpet, AAS pipe organ, software

Michał Górczyński – clarinet, bass clarinet, double bass clarinet

Paweł Krzaczkowski – curator, composition concept                                                               

Suma 4.30 is a collective musical composition which develops and processes Leszek Knaflewski's unfinished project. The concert commemorating the artist will take place on 19 October 2018 in the Pavilion, as part of the KNAF Competition Gala of the Leszek Knaflewski Award.

The work of the last months of the artist's life was originally supposed to function under the name We Enter on One, We Exit on Three [Wchodzimy na raz, wychodzimy na trzy]. As part of Knaflewski's original project, a series of preliminary drawings and sketches were created. The work of the SUMA 4.30 Collective on the composition is based on intuitions, clues and assumptions derived from the original. The artists take as their starting point for the development of the musical form the inspiration which Knaflewski probably started from when working on the last project: the receipt. As Paweł Krzaczkowski, curator and creator of the composition concept, points out: Knaflewski most probably noticed in the formula of the receipt the motion of compression of the world to numbers and their rigorous domination over the qualitative aspect of reality.

Digitalization reveals itself in the successive forms of the composition, which are solely various sets of digits. The connections of numerical structures present in the drawings become a search for spatial forms. We do not know anything about the author’s wish to create a musical form within the framework of We Enter on One, We Exit on Three. However, in the context of Knafewski's work it is a logical translation, concordant with the spirit of his art. Since we are dealing here with a spatial expansion of a number, present in the SUMA 4.30 project in the form of a sound equivalent, we are also interested in the spatial distribution of music, observes Krzaczkowski.

Suma 4.30 is crowned with a recollection of Knaflewski's death. The musicians refer to the Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Deaf Man by Alphonse Allais, a piece based on a score without notes, intuitively evoking associations with John Cage's 4'33'. The quotation from Allais evokes a cold emptiness, a void, which is precisely what was left behind by the artist commemorated by the Collective.