Tuesday, February 9, 7:30pm
Omer Krieger and Udi Edelman will present AKCJA PRL: The Unannounced Festival they initiated last September in Warsaw, Poland. Together with curator Yael Messer, they will talk about action in the public sphere, history, performance and archives, and about the possibility of visual language for public presence.
The event is taking place as part of the initiation of the Institute for Public Presence at the Israeli Center for Digital Art.
In a 3-day festival of unannounced occurrences in public spaces of Warsaw, a group of performers, artists, researchers and activists spread throughout streets, squares and public institutions, embodying an archive of moments selected from the political and artistic history of The People’s Republic of Poland (Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa, 1952–1989). The project revisits the PRL language of public presence, including forms of resistance and affirmation, acts of assembly, manifestation of power and collectivity, surveillance and invisibility. The Unannounced Festival will translate selected historical forms into the contemporary political context. The group’s announced and unannounced actions will emerge from Studio MDM, a storefront space in the monumental Marszałkowska Street, constructed in 1952, which will serve as ACTION PRL headquarters and archive center.
The Institute for Public Presence is a new platform for research, scholarship and discussion of art and action in public space. The institute’s activities include the development and promotion of long-term art projects, a program for members of the public, discussion and action groups, screenings and lectures, as well as the archiving of artworks and actions in public space.
The institute is a unique venue where art and scholarship coalesce into a joint form of action. Its core lies in challenging and expanding the discourse on the meaning of public space in our lives and the role art can play within it, as well as in stimulating research to enable the writing of different histories and narratives with regard to this presence, based on ongoing collaboration with artists and scholars.
The CDA's archives are operating with the support of the Ostrovsky Family Fund and Artis
